


Detonate

by worldturtling



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Assassin Keith (Voltron), Dark Comedy, Disaster gay Shiro, Domestic, Emotional Porn, Happy Ending, Idiots in Love, Light Angst, M/M, Marriage, spy shiro
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-22
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-05 06:49:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11572644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worldturtling/pseuds/worldturtling
Summary: Shiro gets run over by a car, shot at, thrown down an elevator, and falls in love. Not necessarily in that order.  Loose Mr. and Mrs. Smith AU feat. Mr. and Mr. Kogane.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is dedicated to Kay. Silent cheerleader that she is, love her!

****Shiro has consciously chosen three things to trust in in his thirty years of life.

The range of every rifle put into his hand.

The amount of force needed to puncture into a heart.

Keith Kogane’s soul.

 

They’re his keystones and what defined him as a man. It should be no surprise that when one cracks, so do the rest.

But it is anyway.

-

Sunday mornings were booked solid for the next six months, 11:00 am to 12:00 pm. Shiro had them on the calendar he and Keith shared, color coded magenta according to Keith’s meticulous system.

_Magenta. Working on it._

The thing is, he didn’t even remember who first suggested it. It was probably him, knowing himself, mumbling ideas when he was really asleep and Keith taking them to heart with the ferocious intensity he seemed to take everything.

Except him, recently.

And he didn’t want to talk about that right now. He especially didn’t want to talk about it with the over enthusiastic orange haired therapist in front of them.

The thing is, they both thought this was ridiculous. Shiro could feel it in every nanosecond ticking by in this hour of counseling, in every inch of tension in the entirety of Keith’s body.

He had on his knee high black suede boots today over his black fleece and shirt. The red of his jacket was the only pop of color in his visage, so ferocious and bright Shiro wondered if it was sending a signal of vibrancy, of virality, or of anger, discontent.

Meanwhile in the back of his head he’s thinking of things unrelated to this room. Things involving check ins, contacts…

He notices they’re both staring at him. Keith looks bored. Dr. Coran looks… disappointed.

‘Uh…’

“He’s asking us how many times you’ve tried to invite friends in our home,” Keith says in this deadened tone that Shiro feels sliced by.

He has been in front of a firing squad with less deadly accuracy than Keith could have pinpointed in an afternoon.

“We both have busy lives at this point,” Shiro says, age old argument.

Coran seems to be asking for help, a sign from god, and Shiro thinks that can’t possibly be what they teach you in college.

“Okay, you both came here for a reason today. Can you tell me what that reason is, because I have been pulling teeth here for the last forty minutes now.”

“Are we not paying you for it,” Shiro says gruffly but Keith speaks up over him.

“Because we aren’t talking to each other.”

And there it is.

On the car ride over here they discussed dinner plans, Shiro’s parents, and made the radio drone on to fill the rest of the half hour.

At dinner Shiro echoes himself over and over.

During the night Shiro is barely cognizant of whatever place he’s landed into, hopes it’s his home, and proceeds to fall asleep after what are often very long days.

And Keith…

Keith buys clothes. He’s a successful model, (mostly southeast Asian markets) and Shiro understands the need for him to keep up with fashion professionally.

But he also sees his space for his own clothes in their closet shrinking…inch by solid inch until he’s been narrowed down to four white pressed shirts, his tux and his slack, given way to the wealth of Keith’s gifts from work. There are cheetah print items Shiro has sworn he has never seen on Keith.

Shiro doesn’t think less of Keith for this… but he definitely sees it and draws comparisons.

“I changed the layout of the bathroom yesterday.” Keith tells Coran.

Shiro feels like there should be some kind of irony he’s finding this out only through his husband telling their therapist.

“And what did you think of it, Shiro?”

“Shiro just found out,” Keith says before Shiro can fake it. He deflates. He grinds his teeth.

“You should be trying to do these things together, not separate tasks.”

“Yeah, Keith, _together_.” He points a glare at him, and Keith returns it dead on.

“You’d have to be around for it to be together.”

When did their marriage become a fighting match?

 

One where it felt like Keith was always winning.

-

 

Much of the therapy appointment goes like that and then they’re on their way home again. This time there is no blaring radio; Shiro doesn’t want to give himself that mercy. He sulks in the somber mood of the disaster that was the last hour.

Keith is on his phone, as usual, while Shiro drives. 

“That truck is pretty close.” He says without looking up.

“I see it, Keith.”

“Do you see the state trooper behind us?”

Shiro’s jaw locks and he gives out an agitated answer.

“Yes.”

“I need to be dropped off at work, if you don’t mind.” Keith concludes with news that falls flat. Shiro sucks in a breath through his teeth.

“It’s a Sunday.”

“Not all of us have easy nine to five jobs, honey.” Shiro grips his steering wheel a little harder, feels the blood pressure spike, but doesn’t feed into it. He could be better than that.

“If only I had a pretty face like yours to make money off of, baby.”  Not much better.

He doesn’t feel good about that. It’s a low blow. Keith’s silence turns murderous. Shiro turns the car cautiously down the turnpike.

Keith gets out of the car and turns.

“Saltless chicken in the fridge, baby. Enjoy,” He gives Shiro a feral smile and slams the door.

 

Shiro breathes a sigh of relief. With Keith leaves all the tension and pressure that had made the air caustic and suffocating. Shiro took several deep breaths; hadn’t realized he’d been keeping them in.

At some point in six years of marriage, Shiro had found himself in a land he couldn’t recognize.

 His unlived in bachelor pad had suddenly become a suburban mid sized home with a pebbled driveway and a shed and neighbors named after dolls in the barbie line.

His fast food lifestyle and occasional apathetic canned bean diet- turned into nightly dine out or order in fests, an amalgam of chinese menus dotting their unused high end stainless steel kitchen.

He looked down at his stomach.

His amazing six pack- struggling, sloping downwards towards the beginnings of a potential pouch.

The evidence to him could only be described in one way: obscene.

He could really use a job.

“Shiro! It’s not like you to phone in on a weekend,” Allura speaks to him from the other side of his screen, secret modified rearview mirror thanks to Pidge. She looks poised as ever, hair in a high bun and a turtleneck that exuded battle readiness through fabrics Shiro thought were unquestionably bullet-proof.

“I have some steam to blow.”

“Well you won’t be amiss of shoveling any charcoal around here. We have some sensitive information perfect for your abilities.”

“What I like to hear,” Shiro says, grin automatic on his face.

-

He’s killed a man mid coitus, ejaculate and blood pumping out sluggishly together both inside and on him.

He’s spent a year trading himself through the black market to find a source.

He’s lit things on fire that were previously NASA and NSA engineered to be inflammable.

But it’s with Shiro he discovers new lows.

He knew it was a petty thing, having the linens and colors of the bathroom changed out while the man was at work, specifically to see him not notice it.

 _At work_ , Keith thinks sourly while ascending the elevator to the 200th floor where his offices were. A fast elevator by all accounts, but unfortunately not fast enough for Keith’s brain.

Keith had had his bio looked up way before they were married, and he understood that some celebrities could get clingy to their personal trainer. Shiro also had novelty, a war hero with a heart of gold and a bionic limb that fizzed up every so often.

But God, if Keith could make it home in time to poise like the homemaker he tried to pretend to be despite operating in five different time zones at any point of the day, couldn’t Shiro put an effort into coming home from a civilian job with enough of an attention span to get them through dinner?

Enough of an attention span to get them through a therapy session? _That had been his idea?_

 

And then he thinks, almost bitterly, when had he stopped paying attention to Keith?

 

And then a feeling; disgust. Bathroom towel wars? _They were boring_.

 

The ding sounds, like the microwave Shiro’s probably using right now to eat the tasteless chicken, Keith’s attempt at corroborating Shiro’s health fad, and he shakes his head.

Nyma is there when the doors open, waiting for him.

 

She’s smiling. She’s always smiling. It was the kind of smile people fell for, a pretty one, dark haired girl with black eyes and braids, and the next thing they knew they were spilling secrets and had voluntarily given up their life savings and stock contracts. It wasn’t typical form to trust someone in their line of work, so Keith didn’t. You had to maintain the mentality that the person you worked with could be your mark in the span of a breath.

But he respected Nyma’s game, and Nyma respected his, and they both knew they could kill each other at any time and didn’t, so that made them kind of friends.

She had also recommended the neighborhood Keith had a house in. Which now made them kind of not friends anymore.

She’s smiling as she follows him through the office, _wanting_ something.

“How was therapy with the jock?”

“He’s not a jock,” Keith says with very little heart. And a little unnerving Nyma constantly hacks his shared calendar with Shiro.

 _Marriage_.

“If he walks like one, talks like one-”

“Nyma, shut up.”

“Other agents are the only way to go, hon. That’s all I’m saying. There’s more of a connection.”

“You and Rolo sleep with other people constantly.”

Nyma shrugs.

“Yeah, _more_ connections..”

Keith doesn’t respond. He’d hadn’t thought about marriage until Shiro had asked him.  

Shiro had danced with him once, and he’d honestly thought every problem would absolve itself in his biceps.

-

He receives his mission and he’s on a quickie flight to Detroit, to meet with an informant for something someone else needs The details are buzzing in his head, but then he gets a text.

It’s from Shiro. Simple, short, two words. Thirty pounds of regret in his stomach.

_I’m sorry._

He clenches the phone in his hand. It’s their phone, his personal phone, picked out with Shiro and they got matching charms to go on them and put themselves on a plan.

It wasn’t really kosher for it to be on missions with him, but this was supposed to be relatively short.

And Keith couldn’t help needing to know.

He might as well have had only one contact on his phone: Shiro.

Others were programmed in. Fake relatives, fake school teachers, fake modeling agents, everyone linked to a different account in their network who knew exactly what to say when their number was called. But Shiro was real. He used to text Keith when they were dating, before their wedding, even when they first got married. It was cute, a presence even when Keith was in saudi arabia while Shiro trained someone in california and thought Keith was in new york.

An emotional tether more potent than the ring currently in his office.

He can’t stop staring at the two words.

“Sir, the general is waiting.”

Right.

His phone is encrypted enough to avoid cloning, but he acknowledges it was still a stupid move to bring one as he descends from the helicopter onto the pad of the hotel, and into the arms of body guards waiting to pat him down.

They find: his faux fur coat. Condoms in his back pocket. A wink.

The general finds:

Nothing short of a bruised windpipe and the utter need to spill all state secrets lest his wife and family get involved.

A knife lodged into his throat by the heel of a very well equipped leather boot.

Keith finds:

Jumping off buildings to never be quite as terrifying as one anticipates.

It’s liberating, adrenaline pumping, and the minute his fingers touch the rope on the chopper he’s ready to blow up the rest of the room along with the rushing body guards who had the potential to identify him.

He climbs into the seat and breathes deeply. He picks up his phone and texts back.

 

_I’m sorry too. Be home @ 7._

 

Deep down he knows it’s just a temporary ceasefire, but he’ll take the bandaid where he can get it. 

He hadn’t thought about marriage until Shiro had proposed. But Keith didn’t quit. 

He won.

-

“You took your cellphone on a mission.”

Lance is looking at him wildly like that was the most important thing here, and not the bullets they were dodging behind the hollowed out remains of a tank.

“Stow it,” He grumbles and presses send on the simple, two word text. hoists the rifle in his hands. As if he didn’t feel bad enough already, the universe saw fit to not only pair him with Lance on this night mission in the godless nevada desert, but to do so and give Shiro a nice, clean shoulder wound he would have to now lie about at home.

_Home._

A place he would be lucky to get back to at this point.

The fact that he means that in some weird metaphysical way in addition to a way that was relevant to the current moment made him hate himself a little more.

“Can we get this job done so we can go home?”

Lance is giving him that look again. That wild…

“You’ve been thinking about shit that’s not the job all night. Is it the wife?” Shiro cringed.

Lance had _met_ Keith.

Keith had _met_ Lance.

They had been brief meetings. Looks of mutual dislike had been shared. And then vocally shared later with Shiro in different confidences.

But Lance was just digging at this point, and it made him ball up his metal fist with offended intent.

“Oh my god,” Lance gives him an exaggerated eyeroll.  “Can we just do the job and get through this night without you having a crisis over your impending divorce with that vapid soulless cretin you call a husband?”

“What?”

 

 _Divorce_?

Maybe it’s the grenade that lands in front of them and goes off while Lance is trying to push his suddenly rooted body out of the way, or maybe it’s the notion- the reality? That Lance just suggested into existence so casually, so utterly without thought whereas Shiro had invested too much thought into avoiding it,  but he feels all the oxygen leave his lungs.

In a haze, his body running on years of military combat experience, he grabs his gun and starts to cover everything he can, bullets firing out. It distracts him from wanting to vomit.

Lance is rambling on the way back, _That was so cool, You were so awesome, I can’t believe I saw that._

_Be home @ 7_

“We need to book it.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love spies, spy marrieds, espionage, everything in between. I also love writing pathetic Shiro a little too much, but he has such a fun voice?  
> Thanks for reading! Update coming tomorrow.  
> @novelasha on twitter


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The field agent's guide to getting married says this: Enjoy what you can while you can. Prepare your exits.  
> The field agent's guide to falling in love says this: Don't.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dedicated to Kayblebee.

 

“So how did you two meet?” Coran asks patiently. 

Keith is holding onto Shiro’s left hand, his real hand, something that feels more and more alien recently. It tightens. He feels the warmth of Keith’s palm against his own, and a rush of memories come flooding his senses.

“I was in Miami- for a friend’s wedding.” Lance and his hypocritical ass marrying a woman he’d divorce in another year.

“I was in the middle of a shoot,” Keith slides in smoothly, and Shiro recalls the way he wore his red leather, his red boots, amidst a sea of white suits at the bar, the way he swallowed down vodka like water, the way he thought he’d never see that color the same way again.

“He was getting free drinks from the open bar.”

“They were trying to kick me out.”

“I asked him for a dance.” Keith’s thumb caressed over his then, and his heart skipped a beat.

He was also supposed to take down the owner of a Venezuelan arms supplier, but fortune had had it he’d had a medical emergency that morning resulting in his death. It really had been the vacation Shiro deserved.

Keith red on sheets so white, the first time that combination had ever looked so pure, so good, and so so _wanted_.

“And what did you, Shiro, feel about Keith at that moment?”

Coran looks at him analytically. He freezes.

So did the movements of Keith’s hand.

Later, he had thought: beautiful, piercing, cold, burning, a friend and a foe. The destruction of his career. The ultimate stand to the world that he could have a cover, be in love, and be successful at his job all at once.

At the moment he had felt: Drunk. Aroused. Afraid. Turned on. Turned on by being afraid.

“Fear.”

_And how did his brain choose that one word to leave his mouth._

The warmth from Keith’s hand evaporates like a mist. Now they’re balled up in his lap and Shiro can feel them itching to go through him.

“Fear.” Coran echoes back at him, and Shiro can see how unimpressed he looks. Shiro winces. “I suppose we can all be a little intimidated when it comes to...meeting someone we are afraid to approach.” The expression on Coran’s face spells out that he is clearly throwing Shiro a bone here.

Shiro nods along. “Yeah,” he breathes out, but can feel Keith’s glare boring into the side of his face. He can’t meet it.

“And you, Keith? How did you feel?”

A long silence passes. The clock beats tick behind them, and it keeps ticking. They become increasingly louder to Shiro, and the tension locks down the muscles in his neck, making him completely unable to turn and meet Keith’s glare, even if he wanted to.

The air is heavy and the moment passes, hours later, because Keith finally breaks the silence, not with a deafening boom, but with one word.

“Loved.”

-

There’s a kind of barrier that builds up again on the car rides to and from therapy, a silence about the hour that just passed behind them, so that they might continue to live on in this suburban white middle class neighborhood that suspiciously housed too many gay couples for it to not be planned that way.

“Dinner at the Robinson’s tonight,” Shiro says with a delicate tone when he puts the car in park. Keith wordlessly steps out and slams the door shut.

Shiro rubs his temple. Feels a headache forming, and thinks about the icecream lodged in the back of the freezer. The one neither he nor Keith have touched in six months. He looks at his gut. He breathes out.

-

“We’re gonna need more eggs the next time we go grocery shopping,”  Keith notifies him in a casual voice when he finally opens the front door. “I used the last of it to make these cookies.”

Shiro doesn’t think he could have possibly been in the car that long, but when he steps into their twenty thousand dollar renovated kitchen, complete with subway tile backsplash, stainless steel appliances, dark stained oak cabinets and marble countertops, he sees Keith at the island covered in flour. He’s wearing an apron Shiro’s mom had gifted Keith, one of her own that filled Shiro with a warmth to witness, and he’s got a rolling pin out.

“Need any help?” He asks, coming round to stand across from him.

Keith looks up at him briefly. He nods his head to one of the cabinets.

“Get the cookie cutter tin out. Bottom left corner.”

Together, Shiro’s chest framing Keith’s slighter back, they place the dough on the sheet. A somewhat reluctant moan is met with his mouth on Keith’s neck, and flour spreads fast over both of them. Shiro’s hand grips tight enough to bruise, masking a needing he can’t fully expose, and the response is a cold shiver.  

The oven warms up under them. It’s a start.

-

Shiro wasn’t normally assigned with Lance. He assumed Lance was good at his job, mostly because he was still alive and Shiro had seen some of his assignments and...cringed in some instances. Especially looking at a lanky looking computer nerd who was all show  and fake bravado that Lance seemed to exude. Shiro supposed they all had to put on at least twelve different fronts on the daily in their line of work.

But the first thing Shiro gets greeted with when he walks into the all glass streamlined gym that was their corporation’s front is,

“So the misses kick you out finally?”  

Something about Shiro: when he joined the army, he fought in a war. He fought in many wars. He lost an arm. And the government, or _a_ government, Shiro had never really gotten to the bottom of that, built him a new one. A _better_ one, they told him, and he could pay it off in four to twelve short years with his own life. Arguably, his soul.

Right now it’s the _better_ part of him clenching up titanium and steel and trying not to make a small impact into the side of the smug face.

“You live with your Mother, Lance.” He says instead.

“My mother happens to be a very classy lady,” Lance shoots back, but lets the ceasefire pass as they walk.

The gym had users. Five regulars. Three rotating. They were paid.

No one ever joined their gym. If they did, they would first find the payment plan outrageous. But following that, they would find the lack of water fountains anywhere additionally offensive.

Anyway they were mostly under the cover of hired personal trainers, and it wasn’t entirely a lie. Shiro had gone to college briefly to pursue a degree in nutrition sciences before dropping out to join the army instead. He had also done a few workouts with celebrities when it was mission relevant. He had calls from them later to book him again, but he was almost always too booked. Like any Hollywood commodity, once one thing became unavailable, everyone tried to book it.

And so their organization ran, Allura essentially internationally pimping out Shiro’s services under the guise of making people reach their ideal selves for skyrocketing prices. He had trained with certain dictator’s daughters, certain presidents, and certain persons generally unknown to the world powers despite being the world powers. She was weirdly good at finding these black markets and exploiting them.

But then there were missions like these.

“Protect the Tunisian scientist at the world open exhibition he’s speaking at. He’s wanted by several terrorist cells and could be sold for a high ransom.”

Babysitting.

“Lance…”

“We need someone with your look to scare off the competition, but not to worry, Lance will be your eyes on this mission.”

 _Great_.

“Sharpshooter at your service,” Lance winks.

-

He didn’t work for any federal government in particular.

He _had_ a federal contract. Allura liked it that way because money was steady and there was always money in a country perpetually engaged in international hostility.

But that was neither here nor there. Shiro had worked for Altean Corps. for the last eight years, in a facility housed in a fancy sky rise downtown, and was the closest you could get to a cushy job that worked with your schedule.

It wasn’t the first in contract espionage he’d done,

But this babysitting mission for this scientist… Slav… felt off. Felt like someone else could be doing this.

He gets to dawn the baseball cap and glasses, and the thick black jacket he’ll be using to escort the scientist. _It’ll be a 9 to 5_ , he thinks to himself with some bitterness. Home in time for dinner.

“You’ll be most vulnerable while transporting him.” Allura says, and then he’s in a black suburban car normally reserved for diplomats and foreign leaders, waiting to pick up a mark.

He’s just...an escort. He chuckles about it to himself.

“Something funny?” Lance’s voice in his ear, and he sobers. Right.

“No.”

“Package coming at two o’clock.”

Shiro steps out. Military personnel in black face him. The sea of bodies part and in the middle of the huddle is a small brown man in a blue turtleneck, balding and looking pale.

The man hesitantly tries to meet his eyes. Shiro clears his throat and holds the door open. He nods to the brigade. They remain impassive.

Slav nervously crawls over and climbs into the backseat. Shiro shuts the door behind them and gets into the driver’s seat. In his rear view, Slav is nervously picking at the seat, his gaze is restless. He fidgets like a five year old.

“Alright mister Slav, simple rules to keep you safe. Keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle. If I say duck, you duck, understood?”

His accent is thick when he responds.

“Why would you tell me about a bird?”

Shiro wants to rip off the ear piece where Lance has burst out with some colorful commentary. 

“It’s...an expression.” He says patiently. English hadn’t been his first language, but something about being in the military made them all forget that sometimes. He could remember everything he'd forgotten about himself in that time. 

The rest of the evening doesn’t go much better.

Luckily, they make it to the exhibition at the Museum mostly intact. Shiro can feel some of his nerves beginning to grate.

“These tempered glasses you use, they do not protect from all forms of attack. And what kind of sealants do you have for protection from dangerous gasses?”

Shiro slams the door shut a little harder than he intended to when he gets out.

-

He’s a contact normally handled by Shay, but today it’s Keith with an all access pass.

“He wouldn't hurt a fly, he’s just concerned about the environment...and about people.” Shay warns Keith, while Keith loads up his pack with some tranq darts.

“Explain to me the part where he works for a biological warfare facility again?” Shay sighs in his ear. She’s a third party field agent. A recruit of a recruit from the grassroots.

“He’s giving us the information to protect our people.”

“And now he’s giving us him.” Keith zips up a boot, no heel this time.

“He’s nervous, and kind of a germaphobe, so be gentle with him.”

“I’ll try to do that while apprehending him in a bathroom.” That had tactically been decided as the weakest point, because most likely the opposition had targeted the transportation portion as their weakness, and thus reinforced it. Keith still thought they could have done it, having done some, in his humble opinion, amazing things with an SUV running off a highway parallel with a runaway train. But he follows orders.

He walks into the gala with an invitation, Alfor Incorporated is a generous donor to most museums in the world, lest they not get an invitation to an opportunity like this. He also privately thinks they probably have some kind of black market art business going down, but that isn't his division nor his concern.  He eats a canape, and swallows down a flute of champagne.

He wonders what Shiro would like for dinner tonight. Keith could think of a few creative things, mostly involving some unopened lube in their bathroom cabinet. He was fine with the not talking, if the sex was good, he thinks to himself with...not much conviction honestly. Out of habit, he twists at his ring.

And fuck. Nothing to it but to slide it into his boot, and feel stupid for forgetting to take it off before a mission. Forgetting to take his ring off felt almost as sinful as forgetting to put it back on. It was unprofessional. More than that, it was dangerous.

“Target has a bodycount on him. Be careful.”

“Copy,” Keith shakes it off. He moves around the crowd. “I’ve got visibility.” He says from behind one of the boxy speakers. “Real tall dark and handsome kinda shadow,” Keith remarks, looking at the guy. Probably had some kind of bullet vest underneath the jacket to look so bulky. Keith thinks a tranq to the neck would make it doable.

The boots look ex-military. Maybe ex marine if Keith had to put money on it. Keith had taken out twenty of these guys at once before, but doing so here would probably cause too much of a scene.

“You sure he knows how to drop his tail?”

“We taught him every tactic we could.” Shay reassures Keith, and it has the opposite effect. Civilians were never any good at this stuff. Nervous and fidgeting scientists withholding state secrets, even worse at it.

“Amazing he hasn't given us up yet.”

“He doesn’t know not to look for me.” She sounds sad. But Keith thinks it was best to pull her off from this.

“He’ll be fine. I’ll be gentle.” Keith says as he sees the way the small man is making a beeline towards the champagne. The body language on the guard is tense, tense lined shoulders and clenched fists. Keith wonders if he can sense him.

Those ex military types are usually not that great at it though.

He keeps himself eschewed away near a corner by the restrooms, and waits.

-

Shiro thinks he might end up with a dead mark who was supposed to stay alive. Shiro thinks he might kill him.

Lance has been gone from his ear for the last twenty minutes. Shiro has never hated an escort mission so much.

He never thought he would meet someone who would test his patience more than Lance.

“No, no I cannot drink from this glass. It is too dry.”

“This one was freshly poured.”

“It’s too bubbly.”

Shiro doesn’t know how he got roped into playing hospitable host. He has strong words for Allura. He has hopes of an end. He looks forward to going home, well rested, seeing Keith and maybe rekindling some more of whatever the cookie baking incident had been. Something warm settled in his stomach as he thought of that.

And okay, it wasn’t talking.

But it was _something_.

A merging of the mouths to communicate some kind of concept.

It was… nice.

“And now if you will excuse yourself, I must use the restroom.” Slav’s pitched voice rings Shiro back to the annoying present.

“Not alone, you’re not.”

“No, no, of course not. I would expect you to accompany me, because of the twenty thousand different circumstances which we have yet to encounter but may be very probable if you do not. And if my urine leakage is anything to go by,  three scenarios will almost definitely take place.”

Shiro never hated his job like this, but right now he would do anything to switch with a waiter.

“Lead the way,” He says through gritted teeth. Slav looks at him, for an obnoxiously long time.

He shrugs.

“Always be wary of urine leakage.”

Shiro’s limp dick in his pants somehow goes softer in retaliation. And then he thinks he needs to pee too.  He grumbles as he follows Slav down the long red velvet hallway.

He enters the bathroom first. Checks all the stalls. Then he nods to Slav and directs him towards a urinal.

He hears a whispering sound as water tinkles into the drain. He swats at his neck where he feels an itch.

And finds a large metal dart. He yanks it out and jams his earpiece back in.

“Lance!” He yells and hears gunshots from a distance.  He pulls out his own, but a figure is now swooping through the cracked window. He was so stupid.

His vision blurs, and he’s feeling himself fall, a boot swift kicks him at the neck, but he hears Lance shouting from the end of the hallway now. The figure in black looks at him briefly, a scarf over his face. And then his eyes close and he just hears gunshots.

-

“Dude, you totally pissed yourself.” Is the first thing he hears as he comes to.

The fluorescent lights of the bathroom come into focus.  He feels the sinking wet feeling where his underwear is.

“How long was I out?” Shiro asks, gingerly sitting up. “What happened?”

“I shot at him, but he got out with the Scientist. Stole away like a ninja. Then you wet yourself.”

He has a migraine forming. He might not make it home after all. Especially not after needing to report murdering Lance to Allura.

“And Shiro, can’t believe you brought your personal life into this again. No wonder you’re off your game, man.”

“What?” Shiro looks at him, two Lances swimming in his vision, slowly melding into one.

Lance is holding up something gold. His ring.

He squints at it.

“My ring…” He grabs it, turns it in his hand and looks at the inscription.

“This…” it’s too small for his hand.

His ring is in the car, safe and sound, ready to be re-worn with the parking of his car in the driveway.

“Come on, we got an evac coming to get us. Boss lady won’t be happy.”

Shiro can’t move. His heart has stopped on the inscription.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to."- White Oleander

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was my favorite portion to write so far. I genuinely just had so much fun with it. Also dedicated to Kaybae. This may be the only Voltron fic I ever write, so she gets a dedication each chapter.

Having stolen away on a motorcycle, Keith didn’t have much chance to get answers out of the nervous scientist until they were safe at home base.

“Who was that man?” Keith breathes out quietly.

“Wouldn’t your people know better than I? That was the first time I saw him in my life, I’ll have you know.” Slav looks affronted. And Keith breathes through shock.

“Did you see if he had a scar… on his nose.”

“He was wearing sunglasses, and he was tall. I did not feel like craning up my neck for him.” Slav shrugs. And then Shay is there, and a security team, and it’s all out of Keith’s hands.

But that body on the floor, from the brief glimpse Keith got of him before the torrent of bullets…

The glasses were askew just ever so slightly. But the shade of the jawline, the shape of his lips…

His mind could be playing tricks on him. Shiro was a personal trainer. He gave Keith shit for eating crap. He bought coconut water.

But if it was him…

How long had he been playing this game for. And how could Keith be so stupid?

He’s a little reckless driving home.

He feels a sense of relief when he sees there’s no other car in the driveway.

Ring. He needs his ring to keep up appearances. Maybe there’s nothing to this. He breathes out a shaky breath. He reaches down into his boot to get it.

And fuck.

It’s not there.

-

Allura tries yelling at him through the two way communication mirror, but Shiro only dully registers that a noise is happening. It feels like he has a long, slow building case of tinnitus; A low hum turned shrill ringing drowning out every other aspect of reality around him. It evens out into a sharp unquiet at one sight.

The little red mazda is in the driveway when Shiro pulls up. It’s staring him down. Red. Aggressive.

And okay, in the shitstorm that was Shiro’s life, having a potential secret agent for a husband really took the dump.

Keith had met his parents. His brother. How long a con would this have gone on for? If Keith wanted to kill him, there would have been plenty of opportunity. Shiro had been at his mercy practically every other night.

And how could he not have _known_.

It was too perfect. It had always been too convenient.

There’s always been an excuse. There’s always a reason Keith can’t answer his call, or go to an event, or was out of town.

There’s always been a gun hidden at the end of a very big icecream container, one Shiro now desperately wants to get to the bottom of.

But first, he needs to deal with his bomb. His perfectly planted, well timed, mesh wire bomb that he had shared his bed, his meals and his soul with.

He felt a small violin should be playing for him right now. He wanted appropriate background music to feel sick to.

He turns the ring over in his hand. His human hand, with its human warmth and his own ring now secured on it, twin inscription expressed into the skin of his ring finger.

He steps out of the car.

There’s always a chance, he thinks, that someone else had the exact same idea for an engagement ring.

He trudges his way up the gravel walkway, limbs feeling heavier than they ever had.

He opens the door with his key, and braces himself for impact.

“ _Welcome home_ , Takashi.” Keith’s voice carries from another room, but he might as well have shot the words directly into his chest cavity.

The inscription on their rings, in Shiro’s first language. Words handed down from his mother to her newly accepted son in law. Words his mother had given to him every afternoon returning from school, in their rural town away from the city, near rice paddies and rivers. Words now on Keith’s tongue, in his mother tongue, and on Keith’s ring, the ring in Shiro’s hand.  Two words, transcribed into characters. A promise that they would always be a harbor for each other.

 _Welcome Home_.

He slides it into his pocket as easily as the knife of betrayal slices through his insides.

The smell of food hits him next. It’s wafting from the kitchen.

Few things _wafted_ in this house. Shiro’s bland attempt at stinky tofu. Shiro’s gym clothes after left in a gym bag too long at the bottom of the stairs, until Keith threatened to set them on fire. Keith’s hair products from the bathroom.

But never this good. Never from Keith’s cooking.

“Hey,” He finally calls out, a little unsteady. He takes off his jacket uneasily. He feels for the gun on his back and snaps open the holster, but does little else.

“What’s cooking?”

“Braised pork belly stew, think you’re gonna like it.” Shiro wanders into the kitchen, and sees the vision that is Keith, in his mother’s apron, stirring at a pot. Images they used to joke about when they were engaged. About the cooking, about Shiro coming home from work and Keith waiting with dinner. It had rarely ever happened like that though.

Keith’s eyes catch his sharply. He looks at him for a long time.

“I got a special recipe from someone at work,” Keith smiles.

It’s strange to see this. It’s almost numbing.

“I uh… think you dropped your ring in the driveway baby.” He notices Keith stops stirring at the pot. He hit something. Shiro’s played marks before. He can play confident and clueless. He can…

He produces the gold piece and smirks. “I know you gotta take it off for work, but don’t blame a husband for wishing it would never leave.” _I wish you would never leave_ , a tiny voice shouts from inside him and he wants to shut it up.

He’s happy to see he’s unnerved Keith for once, but it’s not any kind of real happiness. He stiffly reaches out for the ring.

“Do you keep it on for all your escapades?” Keith asks neutrally, almost curiously. A non-acknowledged doubletalk.

“I have my dalliances.” He bites his cheek. “Not always good to keep it on for circulation reasons…blood flow.” Keith’s nostrils flare ever so slightly. Shiro keeps his smirk on.

“Can I help you set the table?”

“It’s set,” Keith smiles with a strained look.

He produces a knife in front of Shiro. Shiro goes very still.

Keith meets his eyes, and then looks down, quartering an onion Shiro hadn’t seen.

It’s right next to a bottle of Drain-O Shiro wishes he hadn’t seen.

-

The next few minutes pass in a haze where his body thinks he’s at home even as his brain is telling him, according to empirical scientific data that any fifth grader could follow, he was in enemy territory.

He is served at the table, by a menacingly doting Keith who spoons a hearty amount of stew in his bowl.

Keith serves himself salad.

They sit opposite of each other. Keith reaches below the table and his hands resurface, ring now sliding onto its perfect place, clicking everything together.

And okay, the world isn’t ending. There isn’t a nuclear missile heading their way and generally the governments he has interfered with are stable.

There’s no reason he should feel this sense of impending catastrophe. The world _wasn’t_ ending.

Except it was. A tiny world, contained in a suburban mansion, a Subaru Outback and a Mazda, was now over. A sinking and suffocating familiarity he would never get to experience again with painful bliss.

Keith looks at him pointedly.

“Is the stew no good?” He tilts his head.

_There’s an icecream container at the back of the fridge calling his name. At the bottom of it is the answer to everything._

One very important question he never thought he’d ask himself, and certainly didn’t think so on is wedding day.

_Would Keith poison him?_

And a very stupid, very hateful and self pitying part of his brain, or maybe his heart, thought, _there’s only one way to find out._

Keith sips the wine in his hand like some kind of model, his chin perched on his wrist too comfortably. And Shiro thinks, this _is_ too comfortable. This was six years of a foundation built on _lies_.

Was it the stew, or was it getting a little hot in here?

No, it was definitely the stew.

Except he hadn’t had any yet.

“Did you have a good day at work?” He wishes he had someone’s voice in his ear, telling him what to do, grounding him.

The line of Keith’s shoulders tense.

“Productive.” Keith says with a forced ease. “Yours?”

“A client got away from us.”

“Really?”

“Competition swooped him.”

A stormy look comes over Keith’s face. He looks at Shiro’s bowl.

“You haven’t touched the meal I made for you. Think it was your one of your mother’s recipes too.”

Shiro clenches the spoon next to his dish. No sharp objects here. Not on Keith’s end either.

The glock at the small of his back.

He strains to maintain his poker face, but it’s hard when Keith’s looking at him like that.

“You always like to get the last word in, huh?” Shiro says, with some bitterness seeping through. Let’s see, he thinks to himself while picking up the spoon.

And then the chair’s fallen back, and he’s got the gun pointed at Keith.

Only Keith’s got one aimed at him, and there’s a little red laser attachment that is wavering right around his heart.

“I guess the therapist was right about needing more communication.” Keith responds, hollowly. He’s not sure he recognizes this look in Keith’s eyes.

“What’s the point when it was all gonna be a bunch of lies anyway.” He’s grinning. He can be the asshole.

Keith looks at him. Piercingly looks.

“What’s wrong baby, can’t take a shot? Need a stronger finger-”

Keith pulls the trigger.

A burst of pain hits him, makes him double over and drop to his knees.

Just five inches away from where he wanted it, too close to doubt it wasn’t on purpose.

He looks up. Keith is gone.

-

“You look like shit.” Pidge informs him when he arrives at her door.

“I don’t feel much better,” He shuffles in and feels a cold sense of regret at what he sees. “No.” He says out loud, because the universe couldn’t do this to him. Not tonight, of all the nights.

“The fuck happened to you?” Lance is on Pidge’s couch, wearing _pajamas_. Hunk is playing video games in front of the couch, Shiro briefly notes.

“Welcome to the sleepover club, Shiro.”

-

So he tells the abbreviated story of the 6 years of lies, the betrayal, about the draino and the ring and _being shot through the shoulder again_ (how dare he miss his heart, why didn’t he take that shot, _how dare he._ )

He is gratified by the silence that follows his tale. The death of a marriage that had only been hypothetical to begin with deserved a moment of silence.

Which is when, of course, Lance decides to bring up his theories.

“You know, he probably used his international career to fuck people for information, and maybe,”

“-Only complete that sentence if you have a deathwish, Lance.” Because Shiro doesn’t want to think about everyone who ever made Keith not inviolate. Keith was inviolate.

“Okay, so,” Hunk approaches with his gentle tone. Like he’s herding in a wild cow. Shiro tries to breathe. “What are you gonna do now?”

It’s a question that floors Shiro. Because Shiro didn’t know.

His Plan A had been to goad Keith into finishing the job so he wouldn’t have to deal with this messy afterbirth of a situation. But Keith spared him such a quick and painless ending. Maybe that was his intention all along. A sore shoulder, and a _you’re stuck in this shit with me too, Asshole,_ kind of wound.  

And Keith, as a concept, as an objective, as a mission... _was_ a wound at this moment. A gaping, hole in his shoulder, or more accurately in his heart, bleeding wound that was stopping the flow of blood to the rest of his body. He was slowly shutting down, slowly losing ability to function in his brain, in his legs, in his lungs. Keith would be the one to stop him breathing, not because of a bullet, but because he _is_.

“Guys, is he okay?” He hears Lance’s voice in the distance.

“I think he might be going into shock.”

“He looks kind of green.”

Which is when he loses everything he had ever had in his stomach, onto Pidge’s nice laminate wood floor.

-

He doesn’t own a safehouse, which was a stupid mistake on his part he now acknowledges. He doesn’t really have any friends. He doesn’t have any lovers he hasn’t killed, (or wanted dead).

What he does have, and what he has always had, is work.

“Did the boytoy kick you out?” The rule of Nyma is that she’ll never be where you want her to be.

“He’s an agent.”

Nyma’s silence is all that greets him.

“He’s been lying this whole time.”

She sits next to him, and Keith can only assume this is her trying to comfort him. But he feels an inch away from exploding and her proximity closing in only makes him feel like pulling the trigger that much faster.

“Was he trying to get you?”

“I don’t know. He seemed pretty unprepared.”

“You know you have to end him though, right?”  She’s trying to sound like a saccharine flower, like she’s empathetic, but Keith feels the bubble of mirth skirting her tone.  Like he was her new favorite soap opera.

“I know.”

-

Shiro’s had tequila before. He’s drunken a bottle with a mark who was dead by the time they got to the bottom.

He’s never had this shit in Pidge’s liquor closet though. There’s a little dead worm on the bottom that Shiro finds himself relating to more and more the deeper they go.

“You gotta take him out, Shiro.” Lance tells him, and he’s also racing to the bottom of his own bottle.  “Let me know if you need help, I’m your sharp shooter man.” Lance makes a finger gun sign at him and play-pulls a fake trigger.

“This is a shit safehouse,” He mumbles to himself.

“I heard that and you can pay me back the sixty seven dollars for the liquor I had to smuggle in myself that is in your hands right now, mister.” Pidge had decided to do light housework and is standing tall, with a broom in  one hand and the neck of a large bottle of grey goose in the other. It was halfway through. Pidge could probably outdrink them all.

Hunk’s gentle snoring reminds Shiro that the morning is yet to come. And then is when he’ll have real problems.

-

“Daddy isn’t gonna be too happy with these developments,” Nyma’s voice appears in his ear.

Keith takes a deep breath.

“You really shouldn’t be sneaking up on someone in a weapons room.” Keith says. Not because she surprised him. But because he currently wanted to use every weapon available to ensure she _never_ spoke to him again. “Also stop calling him that, this isn’t Charlie’s Angels.”

Their boss was the unapproachable type, who liked to give commands via phone. So it was stupid of him to reference Charlie’s Angels and say this wasn’t like that at all, when to be honest, he had often thought of exactly that when thinking about his job.

And yeah, maybe it was a little creepy that the boss liked all his agents, at least the one that Keith had seen, beautiful and dangerous. Guy probably had some kind of fetish going on maybe.

Beauty is a lure, and it’s the kind of lure Keith was used to using, so it didn’t bother him too much, as long as he didn’t think about it.

Right now, looking at his weapon made him take a breath. The sheer beauty and finesse in the handle, the silencer, the polished wood, the glowing steel. Something so beautiful and so deadly.

“Eat this, _baby_.”

He looks in the mirror.

Alfor is behind him.

 _Fuck_.

“I hope you plan on using that wisely.” he says with a gruff tone of disapproval. Keith resented the questioning of his plans a little.

Not that he had any. But given his employer assumed he had one, he should at least assume it’s a _good_ one.

“Yes Sir.” He responds curtly.  He meets his eyes through the mirror. Alfor looks stern and unreadable.

“You can take point on this one. You have forty-eight hours.”

“Thank you, Sir.”

A beat passes. Silence. Alfor looks him up and down through the mirror. Keith feels the clothes he wore last night, slept in, ran in, wanted to ram his car into a ditch in.

Then he turns and walks towards the door.

“You still have the ring on.”

Keith doesn’t say a word. Alfor leaves.

He thumbs it.

 _Shit_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look for an update next friday! May come before but I'm gonna try to stick to a weekend schedule. novelasha@twitter, always feel free to talk to me about spies in love!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ROGER EBERT’S GUIDE TO FILM NOIR: 
> 
> 2\. A movie which at no time misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending.  
> 9\. Relationships in which love is only the final flop card in the poker game of death.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dedicated to Kay who also beta'd, bless her heart.

 The smell of bacon, pancakes, eggs, and a visceral sinking future of loneliness capture him in his waking moments.

He shoves himself up off the rug he had passed out on like some college fratboy, and starts to backtrack to where he last put his keys.

“Where the heck are you going?” 

Shiro winces. His brain is not ready to deal with Lance. His body is not ready to deal with reality.

Lance has a plate of breakfast at the table where he's crying out from. Hunk's behind the stove, and Shiro doesn't imagine the side eye he's getting from him either.

“I gotta go grab a few things.” He says briskly.

“Your cover’s blown and so is your place. You go back and just watch, Keith, if that even is his real name, will be there with a whole posse waiting to shoot you down, _and laugh while doing it._ ”

Shiro ignores the tiny voice inside him that was hoping for that exact outcome.

Not that he wanted to die...but to see Keith again? Then he keeps following that line of thought and has to confront himself.

And what? Talk it out?

_Hi honey, we’ve been lying to each other for the last six years. I have no idea who you are. You could kill me. You’re probably planning to right now. Guess those counseling appointments really had a point, we were just two lifetimes too late?_

“Shiro, it’s ground zero.” Pidge cuts with a glare from her bedroom doorway, shuffling her glasses on as she similarly comes to life.

“Shouldn’t we tell Allura what’s going on anyway?”

Every military bone in Shiro’s body says _yes yes yes_. Follow the chain of command.

But still something deeper, hidden and stronger, a cloying masochistic feeling wants to see it through himself. The mountain doesn’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain. This is Shiro’s significant, six year in the making problem.

“I’ll tell her when I get back.” He says resolutely.

When he closes the door behind him, he pretends not to hear Pidge’s muttered ‘if he comes back’.

-

He forewent the stiletto heel for reasons along the lines of delivering a _I don’t want you to die like my last lover_ line.

They tried to offer him a sniper.That was too impersonal. This song had played for a long time, and Keith wasn’t ready for it to end without a petty and extremely personal note.

He sets a scene. The bed is made perfectly, and Keith has only the very best red lace tracing the musculature of his body. Shiro had once eyed this very particular look when Keith had come home from a cover photoshoot. It had led to a fun little escapade, which led to more escapades, and a weekend spent in bed like the newly weds they were.

A weekend wasted in bed, he corrects silently.

It still fit, though it hugged a little tightly around his thighs, riding up but wrapping everything else essential with a thin veneer of red.

Except for the knife under the pillow.

And the little handgun tucked expertly into the waist of the panty section.

He was going to make Takashi’s last night the best night he’d ever lived. He was going to let him see exactly what he had thrown away in his last moments of life.

It’s all on the gamble that Shiro will come back, and he will, because Keith knows some things about his lying soon to be ex-husband.

Home is everything to Shiro. Keith didn’t have one, never had a family. Shiro had only ever known loved ones and community and _love_. It’s what made him such a bright light to follow.

Shiro had thought of the inscription, and when he explained, it had stolen Keith’s breath before he knew what was happening.

It’s ten in the morning. Keith pulls out his phone. He tries not to frown at the absent notifications. An hour passes. Then another.

It gives Keith too much time to stew, and he didn’t like the thoughts he had to stew with. He rummages through Shiro’s bedside drawer, predictably mundane. Headphones for running, a couple of fitness magazines, a smartwatch Keith had gifted him one Christmas, forgotten and uncharged. Lube, and some loose tinfoil condom packets strewn around under magazines.

God, you couldn’t even really tell he shared a bed with anyone, Keith thought with pointed sarcasm.

He turns to the bed in question. Made so neatly, boring beige colors Shiro had apathetically agreed to. Keith wonders if blood will be shed on them tonight. It would make them interesting at least, potentially in a Jackson Pollock kinda way.

The hours of the clock tick by slower. He wanders into the en suite bathroom, and peers into their medicine cabinets.

Eyedrops. Shave gel. Moisturizers, old and new. Shiro’s new razor that had just come in the mail. A part of himself, of Keith, belongs to these things, these events. A part of himself he has compartmentalized away to a very distant place until this job was finished. Then he would have time to process.

He passes hours in the bedroom, and doesn’t think he’d ever spent this much time in this place alone. He looked at the dust on the curtains, the fan. He consciously thought about cleaning them, and then had the sad revelation of a response: what was the point?

The house was dead. A mausoleum to a marriage that had never existed; two people who were legally not supposed to be acknowledged on public records.

Two people had inhabited it. Two separate bodies that were mere extensions of a larger organizations, built and manufactured to destroy. It would only make sense that it would come to this; that they, as individual weapons, would eventually destroy each other.

He doesn’t lose his senses, but he does mentally go into a zone where time became more fluid. He detaches consciousness from his current reality.

At seven pm. he hears the door click, waits three breaths, and then hears Shiro’s solid footsteps walk across the threshold.

Just Shiro’s.

Keith fully wakens.

He would have seen Keith’s car. He wasn’t trying to hide.

He’s up for the challenge.

Keith smirks. He puts his phone away quietly, checks the knife under the pillow and the gun at his nape. And then he positions himself and waits.

He hears Shiro’s footsteps fall on the wooden floors like a drunken sailor.

“You could be a little more subtle in the presence of an assassin, honey,” Keith mutters to himself.

But he keeps waiting at the foot of the bed, waiting to bring Takashi to his knees for him one more time, one _last_ time.

Footsteps never fall on the stairs though.

The fridge opens and closes. Keith’s people had swept this place for weapons, had emptied Shiro’s cache in the shed with disappointing accuracy.

Another fifteen minutes pass, and Keith purses his lips. Fifteen more pass.

He makes a snap decision to don a silk robe and silently perch at the top of the steps.

He keeps making his way down.

His back is to the wall of the kitchen, where he swears he can feel Shiro. But he doesn’t hear movement. He hears something, but it isn’t tactically significant. It sounds wet.

“Are you eating?” He says in the tone of slight annoyance, turning the corner ready to aim his gun.

Maybe a year ago, maybe more maybe less, Shiro had brought a pail of icecream home. It was one of those big tubs that you buy to feed a mass of children at summer camp. It wasn’t particularly good quality icecream, but it was made of milk, it had three flavors for any picky palates, and at most they probably cost four or five bucks. Keith had never been to a summer camp, nor any kind of fun childhood activity. But he had caught movies occasionally that informed him of what an american childhood was supposed to look like, so that’s what he associated this thing with.

At the time, Shiro had said it was for a big company outing the bosses wanted to have. But then they it rained and got cancelled. And so it sat, in their freezer, untouched, for what felt like eons ago now.  

But Shiro’s sitting at the island and digging at what looked like the last remnants of it with a spoon, looking entirely defenseless and a little sad. Keith swept his eyes around the kitchen.

He doesn’t quite know what to make of it.

Something he does know: Shiro looks like shit. To an almost satisfying level.

Shiro chokes on his spoon looking at Keith. Internally, Keith preens.

“What the hell, Keith?” .

“I could ask you the same thing, _Takashi_. If that is your real name.”

Shiro regards him for a beat.

“I guess you could say i was cheated on for six years. Don’t people eat their feelings after something like that?”

Keith narrows his eyes.

“Yeah well you could say I’m going through the same thing.”

Shiro observes him neutrally. “I guess you could.” He says coolly now, and Keith wants to shoot him again. Shiro gets up and turns to bring his icecream pail into the sink.

“Fuck you.”

“I think we’ve done enough of that, baby.” Shiro says calmly, swinging around to casually bring a gun aimed at Keith’s chest.

Keith mirrors him.

“How does this end, _baby_ ,” Keith mocks. When Shiro starts to step to the side, Keith matches him. “Kill each other in a blaze of glory? Quietly? We could have such a wild ride before we do.”

“Was your plan really to screw me to death?” Shiro looks disturbed. His eyes flick to the entryway. Keith continues to match his moves subconsciously and not acknowledge the faint heat on his cheeks.

“Did you really just eat my bodyweight in icecream to get to that thing?”

Answer to both questions: Yes.

Answers both refused to give to the other: Yes.

“That’s really some kind of pathetic, baby.” Keith says, squishing his nose to give a look of faux disgust. He plants his feet, and his gun. He has the front door. He has the doorway. He has everything on his side.

“I could say the same thing, sweetheart.” Shiro says, and he isn’t looking at Keith’s eyes when he says it. The robe doesn’t cover any of the center pieces. Does not cover waist down. Keith knows he’s red under Shiro’s ever observant eyes. He fires an obligatory warning shot right near his ear. It goes through the drywall next to him. A whistle, a silent whisper.

Shiro doesn’t flinch. He knew Keith wasn’t aiming for him.

Keith was compromised.

“Think your aim needs some work baby.”

“Think you need a better escape route, _baby_.”

Shiro looks at him with that grin. That pure, hopeful, condescending and deceiving array of teeth and aggression. This was a Shiro that he only recognized from brief moments of intimacy. A side that masked itself from him. A confident and devilish finish. In their line of work, they all managed to juggle about fifty faces, and were bound to lose the authentic one along the way. Looking in mirrors became a game of Russian roulette, maybe one day you actually look into a face you recognize. Was he finally looking into Shiro's true face?  _Was this the secret agent he had shared his bed with?_

“No.”

Shiro runs at a pace dead set on annihilate, and Keith takes the shot an inch too late. The resounding _thud_ as they both hit the tile floor knocks the wind out of him, and gives Shiro the perfect chance to pin his arm to his side, grip his wrist, raise it, and _slam_ it back down against the cold and unforgiving white tile.

They both watch the gun careen across the tile floor in an elegant pirouette. Keith’s _beautiful_ gun.

Which left nothing but the thin shield of a red lace boudoir item between Shiro, and Keith’s heart. The gun between them was just incidental. Work hazard.

 

“What happened to that wild ride you were talking about?” Shiro’s grin is inches away from him, thigh pressing punishingly hard against his resolutely soft cock. Keith sneers, and regrets foregoing his knife boots.

 

“Guess you can say I can feel a headache coming on,” Keith says with all the bravery of someone who has the advantage, and not peripherally staring down the barrel of a gun held by his husband,( _lover, total stranger of 6 years acquaintance,_ ).  He tries to inch his thigh up Shiro’s side like a slow tease, if only to get to the small fingerblade in his thigh band, but yelps as Shiro grips him roughly and shoves him back down into the floor.

 

“Well I’m flattered you got all dressed up for me, though I gotta say I’m a bit disappointed at your execution.” Looking into Shiro’s eyes now, all he saw was a cool reflection of himself staring right back. Gone was his facade of a husband. Good.

 

“Who do you even work for, the russians? Only they come up with such seriously awful puns.”

“I’m not the one all in red baby,” His perfect teeth widen further, “So were you screwing me for information the whole time, or was I just getting a special deal?”

 

“Fuck you,” Keith spits, hears himself repeating it over and over like a never ending broken record.

 

“I think we’ve done enough of that.” Shiro says, in a strangely sobering tone, and Keith hears the gun cock with terrifying deliberateness..

Keith being below Shiro was never part of the scenario.

He uses his peripheral vision to calm himself down, listens to the slowness of his breath, the beating of Shiro’s heart against his. Time for plan B, C, contingency D-Z.

 

He squirms just a little, and grunts more.

“If you’re gonna shoot me, what are you waiting for?”

“I think I want a confession first,” Shiro says, voice lowering to a whisper. “I wanna hear about all the lies you ever told.”

Shiro’s pinning Keith with his body, but his one hand is still distracted with the gun that’s aimed to puncture Keith’s skull. Keith tries to put it from his mind.

 

“What? You mean you want to know if I ever loved you?’,” Keith breaks into a smug look, and he sees Shiro’s eyes looking back at him, sees his own grin reflected in the widening eyes with a look of hesitance, the same moment Keith jerks his extremely strong leg, and more specifically knee, up as hard as he can.

Shiro’s grip falters for a second, and it’s all Keith needs to butt his head against Shiro’s and grab for the gun, making it spin in the opposite direction. Shiro collapses on top of him. He wraps his thighs around Shiro’s back, and uses his momentum to rock them over, Shiro landing on his spine with an arched yell. He tries to grab for Keith’s waist and toss him away, but Keith is faster, fast enough to get up and grab the gun.

 

He points. It’s already cocked. Shiro is lying on the ground at a distance, prone to him. It’s Shiro’s gun, a gun that he had so stealthily hidden in their home, in their freezer.

Shiro’s looking at him, a half curved moon on the floor. He isn’t making a move. He isn’t trying to defend any part of himself.

He looks like he’s _begging_ Keith.

 

Keith flees through the front door.  

 

He makes a dash for the car, ignoring the way the wind flaps around his next to nothing wardrobe choices. For all the appearance of his near nudity, Keith wasn’t nearly as concerned with being caught by a neighbor looking like this as he was by the thought of a neighbor seeing him like this, and coming to the natural conclusion of _marital dispute_. That somehow felt even more baring and private than anything barely covered by red lace.

His hands are trembling when he throws the car into gear.

He butts a trashcan out of the way out of spite. He hates the neighbors and now was the last time to tell them. He never planned to come back here again.

 

He couldn’t god damn do it.

 

He strings a slew of curses under his breath. Those _aren't_ tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. He can just hear Nyma’s smugness. Alfor’s disappointing look, like he had some autocratic right to be everyone’s father and pass judgement on anyone. On Keith.

All because _Keith couldn’t take a shot._

“Fuck me.” Keith whispers as he speeds the car into the street.

He’s driving recklessly, and he knows not to, but  he might have noticed Shiro coming through the bushes a little earlier if he  was slower. The bullet in the windshield might have been an inch too accurate if he had been slower too though.

He slams on the breaks. Shiro’s bending over with the gun, breathing hard, and looking at him. A dawning look of horror comes onto his face.

“No,no no no,” Shiro yells, repeatedly, while Keith makes eyes at the crack on his windshield, _his_ precious car, inches from his face.

“Keith,” Keith steps on the gas and Shiro doesn’t move. “Baby, lets talk about this.”

Shiro talks to his hood as he gets bodily slammed by it, and Keith doesn’t stop. His ridiculous abs are in his face, and Keith is almost certain this was a terrible decision by now. But he doesn’t stop, he has a course of action.

“Keith, can you just stop and think about what you’re doing for a second?”

 

This little perfect white neighborhood was a series of cul de sacs and foliage, with dense pieces of forest covering things like busy roads, highways, and, conveniently, cliffsides that led off into gradually steep falls and bodies torrential of water.

Keith turns a sharp corner. Shiro’s grip is almost magnetic.

 

“You shot at me,” He yells.

“You shot me and you tried to run me over.” Shiro yells back, but the protest falls on deaf ears. Shiro turns to look around. It may be the dead of night, but even he was probably observant enough to notice the glowing orange ‘DEAD END’ sign they just sped past. “Keith...Keith no. Keith! No!” Keith opens his car door and his body skids onto the asphalt.

He sees the car drive straight through the metal barrier protecting suburban civilization from a tragic cliffside fall, Shiro on it.

It begins to rain. He waits to hear the sound of splashing, of some sign of activity.

The rain soaks him.

Shiro is gone.

-

It takes a while for him to wake up. He wanders the suburb slowly, a dream haze of soaked dread. He was the image of a victim of a car crash gone right, dressed like some  cheesy 70’s horror film’s sole surviving heroine; the porn version of it at least.

The house still looks mostly normal when he walks to it. Like a life could still be sustained inside of it. His bare feet pad on meaningless floors.

He finds a photo of their elopement day. He finds a picture of him with Shiro’s visiting parents.

He finds his wedding ring on his finger, unremoved.

He finds himself with two conflicting truths.

Shiro wasn’t dead. Keith couldn’t bring himself to kill him, because Keith still loved him.

Shiro was dead, because Keith could do his job, and it had nothing to do with feelings.

_You are not a husband, you are not a lover. You are not Keith Kogane._

_You never had a family. You never had a husband. You are at work. You are a gun. You are the slow and steady hand that belonged to a rifle that was very, very far away from everything._

It’s hours when the elevator doors slowly open to reveal him in a  black body suit.

This is how he said goodbye to his long con. That is the only narrative he will allow to exist.

This is how he says goodbye to Takashi Shirogane .

-

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Love is:
> 
> A series of indiscretions that get deeper and deeper as you look away from the inevitable consequences.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is definitely more of a Shiro centric POV chapter, which will be balanced out with Keith next time. Hold out for a little bit of something lighter at the end!  
> Dedicated to Kay, because when I was writing this months ago I swore if it ever got published (genuinely assuming it wouldn't) I'd dedicate it to her!  
> Also, I lied. While revising this fic, I started to add more and the emotional beats felt misplaced all bunched together. So this will most likely be around 9 chapters. The current trajectory definitely puts it past 7 at least.  
> As always, please feel free to talk to me about espionage colored love stories @ novelasha on twitter

The ravine takes him down a flash current and he lets it, in a dumb stupor, submerging himself in water and the thin resignation of giving himself to the current.

_Keith threw him over a cliff._

And okay, there’s a thought.

I mean the car too. He also very much did hit him with a car as well.

_To be fair, he thought you were shooting at him._

_To be fair, the scene on the kitchen floor._

But Keith _had_ shot him.  With intent.

And he had missed with intent.

Shiro had cocked the gun, but when the time came, when Keith was pinned under him and _helpless_ , he didn’t pull it.

What did he do with that.

Keith manages to get the last word in every argument, this time he punctuated it with a car. A crack of thunder, and he remembers how lungs work. And they’re aching. His arms work only because something else in his body takes over, a honed survival instinct his feelings were not privy to at the moment.  Like a wet fish who has a severe allergy to water, he gasps his way to a shore. It’s probably the least cool, least James Bond move he’s ever pulled, and so he’s glad no one’s around to see it. To add mess to sopping wet mess, the rain takes it’s cue then to start pouring on him. He lowers his eyes and falls exhausted into the mud.

He hears the splack of people running through the muck approaching. His gun, carefully hidden in an ice cream container for months for a scenario just like the one that had transpired the past 48 hours, had now been rendered useless within two hours of its recovery. It had been ruined by an angry assassin with a mullet, a red Mazda, and a singular pinpointed mission to tear down every remaining shred of Shiro’s fading dignity.

It could be more of Keith’s people. People he’s never seen or heard of but who probably knew all the dirty secrets about him. It could also be kids, he concedes. He grabs a stick. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen with it, but he’ll cross that bridge when he gets to it.

“Shiro, thank god you’re alive!”

It’s Pidge. And in tow are Hunk and Lance, of course. For some reason, it was always them three. When had that happened? He strategically chooses not to say anything. Pidge regards his face.

“Buddy, you’re okay!” Hunk pulls him up roughly into a hug he doesn’t quite feel. He keeps looking at Pidge. Pidge breaks their mutual silence when Hunk lets him go.

“I installed a tracker on you years ago,” She says, looking down with a faint flush.

“Yeah, which is awesome because now we found you! What happened to you? Did you take care of it?” Lance is patting his arm and looking him over. He has a raincoat on. Shiro dully registers that fact. Preparedness. He tries to speak, but coughs water instead. Hunk slams his back a few good times.

“Thanks for finding me.” He says at last. Because that’s the only thing he can think to say right now.

_He threw me over a cliff._

“Let’s get you back to my place,” Pidge says finally.

In Hunk’s jeep, there’s a neon orange blanket they give to Shiro.

“It’s a shock blanket,” Hunk says in an apologetic tone, “I didn’t know we’d need a towel, um, it’s all I have from my EMT days.” Shiro nods and takes it. They all squish in the front seat, and leave Shiro to hollowly hug himself in the center of the bright orange target blanket in the back. If Keith was watching, he’d have no problem taking aim.

-

 

An awkward silence falls around them at Pidge’s place as they avoided asking certain obvious questions Shiro wanted no part in answering.

“We could try to order pizza and then come up with a game plan for telling Allura…everything.” Pidge tries to offer. They’re sitting in a circle around her table.

“We all called out of work, it’s kinda suspicious already,” Hunk is tending at Shiro’s shoulder with rubbing alcohol and Shiro spies a needle he is none too thrilled about nearby. His wound had reopened at some point between getting hit with a car and falling off a cliff. Go figure.

“Or we could not do that, eat pizza, play videogames, and get drunk while doing both.” Lance suggests in an equally helpful and also, this is clearly the better answer, tone. Shiro hisses as Hunk presses particularly deep with a pair of forceps.

“You got a lot of shit in here, man. Couldn’t you have tried to avoid some bushes?”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Shiro says, just a tad bitchily. He thinks he sees Hunk roll his eyes at him, but he can’t really focus on a lot right now. Shiro keeps looking at his ring.

“Pidge, where do you keep them?” He hears Pidge hesitate. Hunk’s hand tightens on his shoulder and stops.

“Keep what?”

“You know what, Pidge.” He looks at her, but she isn’t meeting his eyes. “You’re our weapons designer, you put a chip in me behind my back, don’t tell me you don’t have a hidden cache along every single inch of this place.” He’s going to regret the bite in his voice later, he already does. He shouldn’t be taking his life self destructing out on her. But to go where he needs to go, he’s gotta embrace the side of himself he hates.

“Hey,” Lance sounds grouchy, and even he points a finger at Shiro. “You can’t talk to Pidge like that. She’s put her fucking neck out for you”, but Pidge talks over him.

“Come on.”

She gets up. Shiro follows, shrugging Hunk’s grip off.  He hears Hunk sigh.

“Pidge,” Lance’s voice wavers behind them.

“Do you want close range, heavy artillery, distance weapons…?” Her voice hesitates a little as she stops in front of her fridge. “Not gonna lie, this feels like giving a drink to someone in AA.” Shiro ignores the implication.

“Electro magnetic bombs.”

A beat passes. She sighs. She types in an invisible touch pad, and the kitchen unfolds. Emotionally, Shiro was numb. But he had enough though process to recognize how impressive this was to install in an apartment building. With neighbors.

“This is kitchen blasphemy, honestly.” Hunk says in a mutter Shiro picks up.

“Where do you keep your weapons?”

“In a weapons room like a normal person. Why, where do you keep yours?”

“Like I’d ever share that information out loud.”

“He keeps them under his bed.” Pidge intones, as she reaches for the drawer where the utensils normally are and pulls out several circular devices. The familiarity of their banter strikes a chord in him. What else had he been missing out on?

“Flash bombs, tear gas, and what you asked for.” He weighs the devices in his hands. It’d be like dropping pennies of chaos.

“I need one more favor.”

In half an hour, he has a bag packed. He’s dry. He has vest on, a thigh holster, and is generally weighed down an extra twenty pounds with ammo.

“Hey guys, can you give us a minute?” Pidge gives a pointed look to Hunk and Lance.

“Um,”

“Hey Lance, lets go…check out the game collection in Pidge’s room.”

“Again?”

“Lance,” Hunk gives him a strained look. They leave a moment later.

Pidge coughs, and he gives her attention. A minute of silence passes as he and Pidge regard each other.

“Way to go full terminator.” Pidge notes with mild amusement. “So I guess we’re supposed to keep this escapade off the books with Allura too?”

“Do whatever you want. Tell her whatever you want.” Shiro shoulders the bag. He has a thought, and digs through his pocket.

He gives Pidge his key. A key. The key.

“You guys can salvage whatever you want from that place. If you manage to sell it, power to you. Heard it’s a buyer’s market.”

 “Shiro,” She says quietly. Her fist closes around it. She throws it in his face before he can try for a soft smile. “Don’t be an idiot. After this, you owe me for once. And you’re going to make it back so you can pay for it.” She stands there in her green shirt and khakis, and crocs, like she doesn’t rake in a quarter of a mil in income on the monthly. Weapons engineer turned kinda best friend, if only because when Shiro was an asshole, she could be an asshole right back. She also filled the role because the person Shiro had previously slotted as his life best friend was now at attempt number three to kill him.

He bends town, touching her shoulder. He presses a kiss to her hairline.

“Take care of the team.” He murmurs, because Shiro might be big and mighty, Hunk could probably bench press an elephant, Lance could shoot a needle in a haystack, but Pidge had collectively saved their asses on multiple occasions and didn’t show any signs of fatigue. She was smart.

No way she’d ever be dumb enough to fall in love with the enemy, he adds to that thought with an eternal self hatred.

The key is thrown at him again as he leaves. He chuckles.

-

Shiro wasn’t trying to get himself killed.

Keith had tried to poison him, take a shot at him, had tried to run him over and had successfully thrown him off a cliff with a car they had only leased three months ago. For certain reasons he might not currently fully appreciate, this whole marriage exploding and disintegrating in his face was kind of good. He would probably have to get a new identity after this, which mainly meant dealerships wouldn’t be bothering him about the whereabouts of said certain vehicle.

Yeah. Silver linings.

But Keith had done all that to him….and Shiro was still alive. Keith had taken multiple shots at him and Shiro was _still breathing_. He may be a blow away from a collapsing lung, but still. Either Keith had really bad luck, (and Shiro, clutching his twice shot through shoulder, decided firmly _no_ , that he was definitely the winner of that category,) or….

Keith didn’t really want him dead either.

Although the cliff thing very much did happen, he admits to himself.

But all in all, this had brought him to a simple conclusion. Really, it was just best four out of five. Was Shiro really playing a game of _he loves me, he loves me not_ only instead of plucking flower petals he was counting down how many death defining moments one man could possibly have in the span of 48 hours?

That was besides the point now. But best four out of 5 now. Fifth round, final match, one last chance to see if he really, truly didn’t know Keith at all.

So no, contrary to popular belief  upheld by the four coworkers in a room way above him possibly holding vigil in his name, his plan wasn’t to get killed.

Was it likely?

Well wasn’t it always? (Keith would probably bite back with something like _, that’s not really an answer,_ or _you’re dodging the question_ , but then Shiro hates that he imagines what Keith would say, because he wouldn’t, because he very much wasn’t here and very much was probably planning another contingency in case Shiro faced him again and the contingency most likely contained a bullet with Shiro’s name on it)

But…

_But_

But in a very essential way, he loves Keith. A creeping sensation of warmth or dread or both find their way from his chest up to his throat, and he knew it as deep down as anything, as part of his anatomy.

He loves Keith.

 

Love is:

A series of indiscretions that get deeper and deeper as you look away from the inevitable consequences.

 

-

When he exits the building, it’s not to much in the way of atmosphere. It wasn’t raining. Thunder wasn’t clapping. The sun was softly setting on the tall brick buildings in this downtown urban sprawl of apartments. Shiro felt a tinge of remorse at the lack of appropriate environmental drama to mirror the mood of his sad little story. For all the world, it was a normal day, a normal afternoon, a normal setting sun.

It was a waxing lazy summer day, until someone took a very accurate shot to Shiro’s head.

Shiro stopped in his tracks. It _hurt_.

But a bullet wouldn’t let him be thinking these thoughts. A bullet wouldn’t let him be looking down right now and seeing a baseball harmlessly roll in front of him.

“What the…” He grabs at the point of contact and feels his head pulsing.

“Checking for brain damage.” He turns to see Lance stalking up to him- with a goddamn metal baseball bat.

“What, trying to cause it?” He’s eyeing the baseball bat. He could take Lance, who was smaller, and lean but still ate too many happy meals to be a sustainable threat. But Shiro had twenty pounds of ammunition and at least two bombs that would possibly implode with enough impact, so Shiro didn’t wanna test that out right now.

“Only someone with a god damn concussion would be as stupid as you’re being right now,” Lance points at him with the bat. Shiro stares at it with a grimace, and then pointedly moves it aside with his bionic arm.

“What’s that supposed to mean,” He asks, because he’s a glutton for some kind of verbal punishment. It’s nothing that isn’t currently a running dialogue in the very back of his mind, he’s just managed to push it back enough with some inane reasoning that somehow, some way, this might turn out all right.

“This isn’t you!” Lance points again.  

Oh.

“Look, he’s gotten in your head, he’s fucked you up. That’s what they do! But the Shiro I know? He’d go in there and shoot a dick without a second thought. He’d go kamikaze and whoop any agent’s ass.

“But this, getting all fucked up over some guy? You’re…” and, as if realizing shouting information about Shiro’s career in a public alley wasn’t a good idea, descended into a lowered hiss, “you’re you. You’re part of us! I worked my ass off so I could work next to you. But you’re just this” He waves his arm and bat to indicate everything that was a Shiro occupied space, “walking disaster now.” He deflates. The baseball bat drops and clatters on the asphalt. “This isn’t you.”

Shiro takes in Lance’s jacket, which looks about a size and a half too big for him.

“This isn’t you, Shiro.” He repeats.

On a level, Shiro agrees with Lance. This isn’t who he wants to be, certainly. This isn’t the vision he’s upheld of himself, to himself, in a meticulous and fastidious fashion the last every single year of his waking life.

He puts a hand on Lance’s shoulder and gets eyes that are near shining. He feels kind of thrown by the amount of care behind them, and he isn’t sure what to do with the tremendous responsibility of being regarded by them. 

He wants to say, I’m a natural disaster right now. Everything emotionally tuned to me has decided to explode within the last few days. You’re better off getting out while you can. You’re better off going back upstairs, back to the apartment, and creating a relationship that never dies in the form of brothers in arms, the one thing I miss from my army days. You guys really have something, and it looks real, and right now the only real thing I have are the bombs over my heart and the very real possibility that a bullet will be put into it sometime soon by someone who already did enough irreparable damage to it.

You deserve a better partner, a better role model.

What he actually says is, “Everyone puts up fifty different fronts in this business, kid.” He pauses, and already wants to throw up at the words he’s about to say. “Sorry I didn’t live up to the action figure,” he shrugs, to finish the affect.

Lance’s face grows red. Then redder. Then he punches Shiro in the chest. He hits where the bullet wound was, left unclosed; that didn’t really matter though. The entirety of Shiro’s chest was so bruised up, any part would have hurt significantly the same amount. So Shiro doubles over, breath stolen from his lungs in a wheezing gasp.

“You are such a self centered asshole” Lance hisses, and Shiro waits for him to walk back into the building and slams the door before lifting himself back up, gritting his teeth.

And then he was alone again.

-

Love was something spies had to be experts in fabricating, corroborating, and in some cases, incepting.

The first time Keith had met Shiro, _really_ met Shiro, it was after their dance.

He had excused himself, and a person not as skilled at reading faces as Keith was would have missed all the clear signs of pain emanating from him. Keith allowed him to walk away, but it was his job to be curious. He followed the vibrations of sturdy, heavy foot falls across the dance floor, into an alcove of the Spanish missionary style courtyard of the wedding afterparty venue, into a little side room that looked like some kind of old fashioned laundry room.

The man was breathing heavily, hunched over, hand gripping the cement sink.

Keith had noticed the metal arm, of course. It was on his waist. Shiro had made a quip about perks of being the secret million dollar man that Keith had laughed heartily at. But Shiro had seemed in full control of it at the time; had moved with it like a practiced pro.

His bionic arm was at his side, dislodged. With regards to the scene, it looked like he had all but torn it off in a desperate frenzy. He took a step forward, unsure of why. Shiro tensed, and Keith almost made a run for it, fluttering out of this life like he had on so many others. But he stayed. He still couldn’t say why seven years later.

Shiro looked at him then. _Really_ looked at him. He turned around, full body, and Keith could see it. Where flesh met metal; the bruising, fused surface. That can’t have been painless. It looked raw. It looked new.

He met Shiro’s eyes. They were open. Vulnerable to him. Completely exposed. Keith had known him less than half an hour, and he’d never met anyone with so few defenses. He walked over slowly, like he was approaching a wild animal. Shiro watched him like he was one. The pain on his face now was vivid, like he wanted to scream.

“Let me help,” Keith said quietly, lifting his hand to the abused flesh. Shiro watched him hesitantly, then nodded.

“Nothing else left to lose,” he grits out.

He presses pressure points around his shoulder, his chest, his heart.

“There,” Shiro breathes stiffly, and Keith begins to work the muscle around.

“Not gonna lie, the chance to feel your biceps is definitely an ulterior motive here,” Keith quipped. Shiro bust out laughing past the pain. Eventually, his breath became easier.

“Thanks,” He said, flexing his shoulder and breathing a sigh of what sounded like relief. “Can I ask where you learned that?”

“An ex boyfriend was a massage therapist,” Keith lied. Shiro barked a laugh again, and Keith decided he liked the sound. It was full sound.

“Should I be jealous?” He peered down at Keith, and Keith suddenly noticed the proximity of their breaths. He felt Shiro tilt his chin up, and there’s no looking away.

It takes two minutes of uninterrupted eye contact to stimulate love in a mark.

Shiro’s mouth was on his before that.

That was the moment he learned Shiro was a risk taker.

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: Is Shiro really this dramatic?  
> Also me: did he not will himself out of existence *by* sheer force of will? I mean season 3 may disprove that pretty soon BUT FOR NOW I GOT MY CANON YOU GOT YOURS. Tbh I think Shiro is highkey inside all the time, so much has happened to him he just rolls with it. But inside he's definitely constantly just 'wtf but okay'  
> COMMENTS ARE APPRECIATED AS ALWAYS.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When you're done with something, blow it up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got creative with some formatting in this one! I feel like Keith is a formulaic person when he's down to the barrel and this is how he needs to process things. But if it's annoying I take all the blame. Also beta'd by me so I will own all the mistakes. Rewrote this portion literally twenty times. Hope you enjoy!

His first kill had been a bloody one.

_A man looks into a mirror and sees himself methodically deconstructed._

_He looks away._

The circumstances: an ugly nightmare. The present witnesses: multiplying screeching ghoulish children.

Scratch that last part out.

He remembers the blood spurting the first time he struck the aorta. He remembers nails scratching at his stomach and dragging skin away.

He remembers the victim, father of two, CEO of one, gurgling and staring blankly at the stranger who had been his last breath.

Later: the smell of decay.

Even later than that: a body bag. Acids. Rubber gloves.

The sound of water receiving the donation of a faceless anonymous man with burned prints and no dental history to discover.

And after all of that: a shower. Keith stepping hollowly into a tile facility, watching streams of the city’s sulfur infused water soften and drag down the caked steams of dried human blood on his neck, ears, hands.

 _Baptized by blood_ , his handler at the time had called it.

Keith learned to prepare against messy deaths.

-

Keith never received training for an internal wound that would be so visibly messy

Potential historians would never fully be able to make out Keith’s mission report after the fifth broken pen made yet another ink blotch into the paper.

-

A duplicitous heart had no business pretending it belonged to any one person. Keith had never acknowledged its existence up to a certain point, and he and his heart had a delicate understanding of mutual inconsequential cohabitation.

 Up until Shiro.

Maybe if someone, anyone else, had ever attempted to skirt their way into his heart’s graces, Keith might not have listened so easily to a narrative too good to be true.  As it stood, he had never agreed with the entity known as his heart, had never consented to receive these feelings. In the end, it had left him in a futile and useless mess. The lack of blood visible was the most jarring part of the aftermath to a most violent death of not only a person, but of an entirely unseen world shared between two people of a dubious existence.

-

The job is the job is the job, until it isn’t just a job anymore. It’s the smell of a particular gentleman’s cologne, until it’s the smell of an event a person will never be able to disassociate from that smell, until it’s the smell of decay. And it’s the smell of decay until it isn’t. Until it’s the smell of an occasional work hazard.

It’s a buisnessman’s clothing, until it’s just a tie. And it’s a tie until it isn’t. Until it’s a noose, and the cavalry arrives just a moment too soon.

It’s a haircut maintained by part human part mechanical hands, until it isn’t. Until it’s just the shape and texture of something like hair.

It’s his scent, lingering in his clothes, his hair, his hands where they last touched the most biblical parts of him with effortless tenderness,

Until it isn’t.

-

Here is An itemized list of everything belonging to the entity formerly known as Keith Kogane, newly widowed:

  1. A box of photos, two hundred and fifty six to be exact, taken within a six year span, and subsequently some falsified photos to verify there had, indeed, existed a Keith Kogane prior to those six years. But a majority, with misfired intent, were of a face and a time that had occurred when and where they were said to occur.
  2. Nine (9) Pairs of shoes. Two (2) of those pairs were Nike classics.
  3. A boxed DVD set gifted from one partner of the Discovery series _Cosmos_ , narrated by Neil Degrasse Tyson; autographed.
  4. A fully equipped wardrobe ready for any occasion; quantity unaccounted for.
  5. Various other accoutrements of the materialistic kind that would soon fade away to an imperfect memory, of varying unimportance.
  6. A ring: simple gold band of a modest price, with an inscription which, to the discerning Japanese fluent reader, would translate to a sentiment akin to _welcome home_.



These were things. They had no meaning, except for the ones emotions and sentiments and memories attached to them. And memories could be fabricated. Emotions could be forgotten. In general, these were unquantifiable, and so could not be measured in terms of importance. This allowed them to be filed away as unimportant, from the moment the entity who gave them their value ceased to exist.

 **KOGANE** :

The brand name for a ramen Keith had walked across in a grocery store once, the image of which had flashed in his mind’s eye when posed with the question _what’s your name_ by a very handsome then-stranger, with a metal arm and a gambler’s smile.

Later, it became an offering. Something he could give when he had never existed prior and so ergo had nothing else to offer.

MARRIAGE

  1. the legally or formally recognized union of two people as partners in a personal relationship
  2. a combination or mixture of two or more elements.
  3. An institution Keith had wholly disregarded, until _he_ had asked. At which point, the thoughts had been, why not? This did not prepare him for the uncompromising, suffocating, blissful normalcy that would follow permanently attaching himself to another person, and consequentially, feeling like someone had stuck him with a rusty pike at the sudden absence of it.



 

Marriage was:

Not for the feint hearted.

Not for Keith, apparently, either. This was indicated by the dead husband who’s body most probably occupied the bottom of a ravine. Keith would morbidly choose to watch the news at a later hour.

 

But the faces in his memories still remained.

-

In a fever dream Keith will only recall in the most sensory way, he sees him again.

 

They’re on a beach Keith doesn’t quite remember, but that’s not important.

It’s nighttime, and they’ve absconded to a beach after hours, with no people in sight. It’s a balmy summer evening, the park had long closed.

 

Shiro is holding his hand. Keith is looking at the night sky, vast and endless and dotted with mysteries he’s explaining to Shiro. Maybe he’d always had a budding desire to follow astronomy, but that’s not important.

When he takes a breath and turns his head, Shiro’s face is right there, watching him instead.

.  

Dark eyes watched him with the most quietest of tender looks, and Keith’s breath stopped to be caught by them. What could he give to these eyes and these hands that he had to offer? And suddenly, the vastness of the night sky translated into the way Shiro was looking at him, that made Keith feel the vastness of a need to fulfill something, to be something _more_. Keith had no explanation or understanding for the feelings that flew forth. He had no answers.

No one had ever looked at him like that.

These feelings should have been a red flag, Keith should have trusted his gut and not his undiscerning heart, and caught the first train to another country.

But in that moment, the ocean could have swallowed them up and the sky could have plucked them out, and Keith would have been blissfully unaware, because Shiro’s mouth on his became the gift of the universe itself.

-

These feelings had never gone away, they’d only been suffocated and burned by repeated indiscretions and murderous silences.

 

He had wanted a last name because it would have been nice to give something to Takashi. That’s all.

He hadn’t branded himself or anything for a stranger he had shared a bed and six years of his breathing life with.

-

 

Except he very much had.

Takashi Kogane had left a brand on Keith. By a series of circumstances that meant mutually assured total emotional annihilation, and societal logistics, Keith had grounded himself to the sturdy tree that was Shiro’s branches, like low hanging Spanish moss, like intrinsic decoration.

So Keith needed to be Keith Kogane for a little while longer. Until he could figure out how to be untangled. Until he couldn’t remember the familiar touch of a metal palm on the nape of his neck to draw him into a customary goodbye kiss any more.

-

The most legible parts of the mission report read thus:

Subject: _Deceased_

Cause of death: _Automobile accident._ _Driver at fault._

-

After thirty two hours and change of nonstop adrenaline, Keith sleeps on a bunk for approximately 45 minutes. This is by no means a good rest. He wakes up smelling sea brine and needing to retch into the nearest container.

 

He proceeds to go about the routine of becoming human again, and goes in search of a coffee pot to abscond with.

No one in the hallways bother him. No one looks at him, makes eye contact with him, or generally acknowledges his existence. Keith doesn’t think anything of it, and he’d really rather not right now. He has one place of joy in this mildly toxic workplace, and it’s in the underground facility portion of their building.

 

It’s in the explosives lab where he encounters both a familiar face, and someone he had forgotten about. The person currently at fault for everything, if Keith could point fingers.

 

“They stuck you down here?” Keith asks, somewhat mystified.

 

Slav turns from where he’s sitting and regard him slowly, suspiciously, as if they’d never met before.

“I kidnapped you from the bathroom.” And fuck, if that wasn’t just a few hours ago, relatively speaking. Just last week he was living a normal life, all things considered.

“Why do you look angry with me?” Slav says as a hello. Keith frowns further.

“That’s just his face.” An agent who ran the lab walked passed them, and Keith ran names in his head before he remembered, Axca. “You here to blow some stuff up?” She asks him, while handing him a detonator, in effect answering her own question.

 

Keith’s de facto place to process in difficult moments and have potential dissociations in, and conversely Alfor Incorportated’s least inclined place to be once Keith was inside of it, was the explosives lab.

 

Axca chose to wore a mask most of the time she was down here, something about protecting a pretty face that Keith understood but didn’t feel should apply to him, in an almost resentful manner.

 

Within an hour, Keith lined a car with nitroglycerin. Axca was now next to him observing the reaction once the ignition was turned. Slav was repeating things over and over to them, along the lines of _reckless_ , and _that glass isn’t radiation wave protected_.  

 

“When you’re done with something,” Axca says before he presses the little red button, “blow it up.”

Keith didn’t really know what Axca’s deal was, but he sort of liked her more than he liked himself right now.

He has a root deep satisfaction at seeing the combustion of the Dodge Caravan.

He watches the fire in the reflection of her black mask, watches as it turns to a smolder.

 

It’s a contemplative moment. The pyric limbs lick at the tires and Keith imagines he is apart of them, part of the deconstruction of the materials on a molecular level. He could alter the chemical composition of something with enough heat, maybe he could do the same to himself.

 

Keith Kogane had once spent an afternoon driving around his mother in law in a rented light blue minivan. The circumstances of the rented vehicle were disparaging (No accounting for taste in Shiro’s attempt at financial frugalness).

His mother in law owned a nokia phone classic. She adored it, carried it in a little knitted pocket necklace  she had made herself, (and had additionally made Keith a matching knitted hat).

She would leave the ringtone on, and throughout the trip it would ring, from her husband who was with their son, or from their son himself, asking how they were, checking in on them for lunch ideas, and various other mundane errand related communications.

Throughout their month long visit, Keith had gotten accustomed to the ringtone of the little ancient and indestructible nokia phone. It was her alarm clock, her pill reminder, and the prideful stamp she put on her navigation of modern technology.

One morning, when the in laws had left, Shiro and Keith woke up to the empty and soundless household. They stared at each other in the silence for a long moment. Then broke into a mutually understood laughter.

Shiro’s ringtone from then on had been the classic nokia tune on Keith’s phone.

 

The Dodge Caravan under them burns. It’s not at all related to the one he had driven. Keith is unsure why this wild and mostly forgotten memory had suddenly appeared to him at such a random and inconsequential time.

It’s because he’s lost in this memory that he doesn’t notice Axca’s faceless mask has turned to stare at him. He doesn’t know how long she’s been doing so when he turns to meet- his own reflection.

He has a front row seat to the way his eyes widen and the sudden release of all the oxygen from his lungs at her next words.

“Your phone is ringing.”

The sound of the implanted nokia ringtone makes its way from his memories, and carries over into the very real present.

That phone only existed for one single person.

He handles the phone in his jacket, and lifts it to his ear with the most dreaded desire, all while watching his face reflected back at him.

It’s all he can do to breathe into the receiver.

He doesn’t have to wait long for a response.

“Hey baby, think you forgot something at home.”

Keith felt his throat parched. Keith Kogane answers back.

“What’s that?”

 “Me.”

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wowee I second guessed myself so much on this chapter. A lot happens next chapter, and I was struggling to keep it all in this one until it made more sense to break it off where I did. As always, feel free to talk to me about spy marrieds @novelasha on twitter. NO ONE IS LOOKING FORWARD TO LIGHTER NONANGST FUN TIMES AGAIN MORE THAN I. Reviews are appreciated :)


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But one who loves must share the fate of his loved one.-Mikhail Bulgakov

****Much to his mounting disgust, Shiro couldn’t stop thinking about how, every single second leading up to him trapped in this warped elevator, he genuinely had some semblance of hope that things might swing in his favor.

Which is when the sirens took their cue to sound.

He hangs up on Keith first. It's a cathartic moment; the illusion of having the last word for once. Even as alarm sounds blared both in real time, and in his inner psyche. That should be the end of any voice in his ear, but it isn’t.

“On a scale of one to tremendously and spectacularly stupid, showing up to your _assassin_ exhusband’s _assassin_ place of work, armed to the teeth in hopes that he’ll take you back is just…”

“Pathetic.”

“Yes, thanks Hunk. Pathetic.”

It’s a moment where Shiro needs to decide it’s not the voice of God spelling out his sad line of logic, he touches his ear. Metal meets metal.

“Pidge,” he growls, while the elevator is still catapulting him at a normal speed to the top floor. It’s seconds until the ground drops from him, he shouldn’t be arguing with the only potential soul in the world who cared.

“I’m here to save your worthless butt, and you’re lucky Allura’s so understanding.”

 _“Shit”_. His life may very well end here, but if it didn’t, it would as soon as he saw Allura again.

“She said spare no resources. So listen, my mini-me’s are attaching themselves to the cables of this elevator and they’re gonna stop it before it eventually hits the ground like the trainwreck you are.”

“You know, Pidge, I get the point,” He says, but he is breathing a little easier now that he has the familiarity of a friend at his back.

“I don’t care, you’re making me work on my day off. Now, thanks to plans Hunk has generously read through, you should be able to get out of the cable car and escape into the vents. From there, we have a shoot area that’ll slant you into the dumpster. That’s where your getaway car is.”

“Dumpster?” He’s eyeing the numbers lighting up at each floor they go to. Like Pidge confirmed, it was getting slower and slower the closer he got to the top.

“Don’t get precious now Mr. My Life is the worm at the bottom of the mezcow bottle.”

He blanches.

Then the elevator comes to a dead stop. It’s a floor away from the top.

He hears Pidge and Hunk breathing on the other side of the line. He hears his own breath, then spots the camera staring at him in the corner.

He gives it his most charming grin.

“I don’t like how we left our last argument.”

He counts the seconds that tick by, an awkward stretch of silence where he wills no one in his ear to speak up. Now was his time.

 

**\---**

 

“You’re alive.” It’s all the effort he can currently put to keep the tremor he feels building in his fingertips and through his chest away from his voice.

“Don’t sound so excited to see me. You know, our insurance rates are gonna fly now because of that stunt you pulled.”

“I always hated that car anyway,” He says, feeling his chest thawing, his blood beginning to pump.

They had him trapped in an elevator, and Keith could see it on the nearby computer station. It was as exciting as it was terrifyingly imminent.

“We’re running sensors on the building now,” Nyma is next to him because Nyma is always next to him.

The rule of Nyma is she’s never where you want her to be, and that place is _anywhere but here_. As soon as Keith’s line went dead, she was in the lab, next to him, pulling up a screen with schematics.

But right now, he focuses on the very real vision of Shiro, in his workplace, visibly armed to the teeth in the least subtle way possible. Keith almost- desperately- wants to help him redesign the tactical layout of this outfit.

“Not your smartest move, Shiro. You’re trapped, and I’ve got a big red button. I’m beginning to think you want to die.” He grins at the vicious feeling of Shiro being a live wire in his life, at any moment fatally charging the water he stood in.

Nyma murmurs something like _we’re ready_ , but it drowns out in Keith’s ears under Shiro’s words.

“I guess I’m gaining a new found appreciation in the phrase _till death do us part_. Kinda having some regrets lately.” Keith frowns with annoyance.

“If you’d stayed gone, we wouldn’t be here.”

“Well maybe if you were ever home, we wouldn’t be here.”

His expression sours, stirring sour milk in overly bitter coffee. “What, keep lying till one of us just didn’t come home? Were you really happy with that?” He regrets the words as soon as they leave his mouth, momentarily transported to a time and place where they could have this conversation alone, in private. But as he peers into the screen, tries to see Shiro’s face amid the fuzzy blue lines, he’s jolted back into the reality that is this, their reality. Barriers and hidden faces and secret identities. Shiro hides his eyes. It was more honest than they’d been since they’d met.

“Yeah…I guess we weren’t.” Shiro’s face tilts down, but he can see the way his frown slants, a slash like a knife wound across his face.

It’s the saddest undercurrent of defeat in his tone that makes Keith’s throat clench up, makes it hard to press the button, makes it hard to send him hurtling to the ground in a scary sudden death a la a Disney ride.

So it makes no sense to him when, his hand hovering over the execution button, but not touching it, not applying that pressure, the video feed still manages to cut short and he hears the grating of steel and ropes grating together in a free fall.

Silence hangs like the aftermath of an unstrung guillotine. A stillness in the way the air flows around Keith holds for them all to hear, with nearing inevitable intensity, the dull mechanical collapse of a man sized metal box, flattened to the ground in rapid speed. Keith thinks he can feel the dust settle on the other side of the building, can see the molecules settle indifferently around the destroyed infrastructure.

In the deafening silence, Keith stares, with increasingly open eyes, the way his finger did _not_ press the button.

He only hears his heart for the following beats, until-

“Jeez, that finally shut him up.”

Keith doesn’t compute the movements because one moment he’s staring in dull horror at the unpressed button, and the next, he’s got both knees pinning Nyma’s hips to the concrete floor, and his hands are finger locked around her throat, and his thumbs are pressing right above where her adam’s apple would be bobbing.

His fingers dig under her skin, feeling her pulse flutter like a hummingbird when all she does is grin at him.  He pulls back abruptly when the curl in her smile makes the blood curl in his veins, makes his stomach churn with the obscene way she’s staring at him.

He sees the knife before it makes it to his stomach, rolling over her and towards the lab. In his peripherals, he sees they’re alone, Axca probably took the scientist and bolted. Good. Because someone was going to pay.

“You think you were the only one with a job here?”

“What?” His voice cracks from the heat and pressure used to deliver his words, like a rolling steel through hot coals.

“I was sent to make sure the job got finished if you couldn’t pull the trigger.”

The trigger.

_The trigger?_

Keith had _pulled_ triggers. He had seen Shiro fall off a cliff under 3,092 pounds of metal and glass. The fact that it hadn’t worked was not user error.

And he would have pressed that button too.

He would have-

Not looking at Nyma is a mistake, because Nyma’s blade comes out and before he can move out of the way,she grazes just north of his aorta. He pulls back just a hair fast enough to save himself from being the next spill site; to be cleaned with copious amounts of bleach and mops.

He’s running on instincts he doesn’t feel, muscle memory honed in the idea that self preservation must be put above all else.  It isn’t a will behind a drive to survival so much as his fight or flight instincts both being kicked into overdrive, and muting all the background noise.

Because the now is Nyma. And the where is the bottom of the building that now seemed to want him dead, in the explosives lab.

“Just think of it like liquidating assets. You stop being useful the moment you hesitate.” She echoes their mantras with enthusiasm.

She zaggs at him again, but he ducks in time and uses her weight to propel himself around her.

_You had to maintain the mentality that the person you worked with could be your mark in the span of a breath._

“You’re as good as dead now, anyways.” She’s still churning her uncomfortable laughter. Keith stops, his breath frozen solid for the two seconds it takes to process those words, spinning himself out through their implications; drawing himself back in like a reel.

_Keep moving or you die._

There’d always been a glint in her eyes that made him see too much of himself to trust her. Her lip curls, her canines shine at him.

They’re in the bottom of the explosives lab, and Keith had never felt safe enough around Nyma not not have a backup button in his pocket.

 

**\---**

 

 

“What the fuck, Pidge.”

“I said it was a dumpster. I don’t know why you’re surprised.”

“What is a Red Lobster even doing around here?” He asks as he peels back the fish carcass from his thigh holster.

“At least it was something soft to cushion your fall.”

Shiro gingerly climbs out of the fish trash, and carefully holds his breath while doing this.  He looks around the dumpy, but not the worst looking alley he’s ever been in while attempting covert operation and carrying extreme heat.

“You said something about a getaway car?”

“Around the block, just a few feet once you turn right.”

Shiro nods to himself and heads left. “Great.”

The conversation had ended abruptly, having a company try to cut his cables and his aspiring widower husband probably being the one behind it. He thinks a real moment happened in there, even if he couldn’t see the face worth a damn.

So that hadn’t gone as smoothly as he expected, and he isn’t sure what he expected. Whether it was to look Keith in the eyes one last time as he tried to kill him, or whether he was going to enact grand retribution- But Keith sounded like he was smiling. It was a sound Shiro had forgotten, but he knew it as well as he knew the sound of gunfire.

Still. He couldn’t overlook the whole third attempt at killing him. It was getting to be a little rude.

“Shiro, I said right.”

“I know, Pidge.”

“What do you think you’re going to do?”

“I didn’t come all this way to go home empty handed.”

“Didn’t you though?” Shiro flatlines his mouth. He grits his jaw, hefts his shoulders, and adjusts his fish smelling apparel. He’ll find another exit. He didn’t get to be where he is in the world, unknown and infamous, by quitting before it was all over. Or by responding to every petty dig.  

He hears the clash of something like a chair being knocked over, followed by Hunk’s muffled cursing in the background.

“Guys?”

“Oh fuck, Shiro-“ Pidge starts.

And then the window behind him explodes.

The sound of glass shards shattering apart and tinkling to the ground in the wake of a deafening blast sends Shiro to the ground. He turns, knee jerk reaction to respond to active threats (and running _to_ them), to the sound of shoes crunching on the layer of glass. He follows the thin legs up, up up- to familiar, wide shocked eyes.

For a moment, Shiro forgets the breath in his lungs. His heart thuds, and in the space between one beat and the next, Keith looks as surprised to see Shiro as Shiro is to see him.

It only lasts for that small moment, glass still flying, flames still licking at his heels. For one moment, the space of less than a second, Shiro saw Keith for what he really was.

Keith was afraid.

 

**\---**

 

 

_The contingency is the contingency is the-_

There has always been a bright red motorcycle parked discreetly in an abandoned garage  behind a really beat up sedan next to the flower shop three streets down. Unbeknownst to his coworkers, his husband, and put out of his memory for far too long.

The smell of flesh burning still permeates his senses, sending him down an alley through unwanted flashbacks. He shakes them from his head, and runs towards the path before him, to the flower shop, down the back way.

 _Shiro_.

Well, that was over. A lot of things were going to be over soon but at least Keith didn’t have to worry about killing him for his professional sanity anymore. In his mind’s eye, he sees the very simple actions he needed to take. Bike. House. Closet. Weapons. Money. Canadian border, if not out west. It was harder to track people once they went west, an aspect of American historical geography he’d always had an ironic appreciation for.

Nyma may not have died, given his track record lately, but Keith, finding himself recently more and more in the rare state of mind to be personal about something, hopes the flames devoured all her features, her pretty face, her stomach churning laughter. He turns the corner-

And walks into the cold barrel of a gun pointed directly at him.

**\---**

 

Shiro stares at the vacant space that had momentarily been Keith shaped. It could have been a mirage, but given the fire, the glass on the ground, the utter destruction left in his wake- it might as well be a translation to the meaning of _Keith_.

“Shiro, are you okay?” Pidge is solid in his ear, concerned and genuine.

“Pidge, where’s the car again?” He gets up, brushing diffuse glass off his shoulder.

“It’s gonna be right in front of the street, flower shop will be in view. White. But Shiro-“ He starts to run, knowing he can’t make up for Keith’s speed, but he can sure as hell meet him at the final destination.

“I’m heading over now.”

“ _Shiro_.”

“What?” He lands on his ankle at a particularly hard angle while beating the pavement, roughly a hundred pounds heavier than he’s used to carrying.

 

“They burned Keith.”

 

**\---**

 

 

She may not have hit a major artery but he’s still bleeding enough that running away from a burning building isn’t going to be a sustainable activity for much longer. And running through streets in broad daylight with a knife wound in your neck isn’t the most subtle thing a secret agent does.

So it really sticks another knife to his plans to find a gun is pointing at him.

He stills, and removes the hand from his neck. He raises both in the air.

He has no gun at his back. He has no work. He has nothing.

He shakes his head internally. That wasn’t true.  

He has himself.

“Come to collect the bounty?” He arches an eyebrow, forces his shoulders to relax.

A gun is pointing at him, but it wasn’t the most dangerous thing. The most dangerous thing is the look in the eyes of the owner.

Keith had met Lance once before. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Keith didn’t believe in love at first sight. He did believe, however, in looking across a crowded room, seeing someone you’ve never met before, and just _knowing,_ that somehow, they're gonna fuck you over.

Lance was that person.

“Figure I’d solve a lot of people’s problems today.” Lance says, but he spits it out with a venomous heat that throws Keith for a moment. He’d seen Lance maybe twice before. They had been brief, innocuous, and one of them possibly totally one sided.

A soft breeze wafts over them, gently lifting loose hairs and lightweight fabric, and washing the smell of burning rubble over them.

“I never thought he’d send a lackey to finish the job.” He takes a step that Lance mirrors.

Lance shoves the gun at him with an intense look. Keith takes another step.

“Shiro didn’t send me.”

“So you’re seeking revenge or something?” Keith takes a deep breath, and looks, really looks at Lance. His squared shoulders, his set jaw, his dark eyes burning up at him from his skull. Read someone long enough, you’ll see the wounds written on them. Keith’s was visible, on his neck, and maybe less visible, in the way he carried his hands, the way he angles his eyes.

He could use a gun. He could use knives. He could handle bombs and set the explosives at strategic angles to collapse the very foundation of a hundred story building. but the craft didn’t lie in those things.

His business was people.

Lance may not have any visible wounds, but he was _bleeding_.

"Is it because I fucked him?”

Lance shoots, but he misses. Keith is already under him, knocking his arm up and maneuvering his wrist to his shoulder blades, crunching the startled yell out of someone not used to hand to hand. Keith brings his other gun holding arm around his neck, and closes.

“Can’t believe he fell for a cheap trick like you.” Lance still manages to choke out as Keith’s arm strangles him, dragging them behind a dumpster and out of street view.

“I’m very expensive, actually.” Keith grunts, finally letting go as Lance grows limp.

He watches as Lance falls to the ground, like the sack of potatoes Keith would be peeling if he went anywhere near the Russian border.

Right, escape.

**\---**

 

 

Shiro stares unseeingly into the foreseeable future. It’s all happening very slowly and very fast all at once. The escape exits were slowly boarding up their doors. Things were happening in a very wrong and final way.

“What did you say?”

“They burned him. Someone issued a burn notice on him, Shiro.”

“Who?”

“We’re trying to figure that out. But Shiro…he’s dead.”

Shiro considers this for the span of a breath, before he hefts his foot forward, and begins running again.

“Not if I can help it.”

“Shiro, what are you doing? You don’t even know where he’s going.”

He knew. He knew it as sure as the look on Keith’s face. Open, wild, caught and  cornered and unpredictable in its fevered fear. He’d seen the look in every mirror on every wall since he was 19.

“He’s going home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It took me about a year to realize how I wanted this story to end, so here's an update finally ? Thanks to all the kind comments everyone :) They also really made me want to come back to this story. Writing for spies is genuinely so fun.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Every encounter with you is a game of Russian roulette, and I never know which one of us is about to go off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you Kay for beta-ing this chapter!

-

The road to _that house_ is paved with landmines of emotions.

The road to that house is paved in blood.

If he disregards the burning building behind him, the paid assassins behind him, his living gun for hire husband and the miles of road he is putting between all of that and himself, this could be a mildly ordinary commute. This would be true if not for the fact that Keith is fairly certain the current trajectory of things, evidenced by the last three days of mute destruction to everything he stands on, is careening, not slowly, into a very final destination. Very possibly his grave.

-

Going back to the house is like going back to the scene of a nightmare, surprised it isn’t all in his head after all. He’s parked in the driveway a million times, in a million different lights and seasons and environments. But now something else is forbidden and different in the shape of the house as he rides his motorcycle up the cement path. It could be its own sentient object, the way the windows stare down at him with an unspeakable emotion. He doesn’t recognize the house in the same way it doesn’t recognize him. He walks through the threshold, and feels like a trespasser.

When you step into an empty home, it doesn’t matter if it’s yours or a target’s, it’s always a feeling of loneliness. It might be him projecting emotions onto a domicile structure, but it still rings true. If walls could talk, they wanted people- and the absence of that, the dark of that, just leaves it a cold concrete structure with no purpose or meaning.

He  feels himself relating; his recent unemployment is currently giving him a new perspective on where he had laid the foundation of his identity, and all in all he wishes he could be something as simple as a house right now. It would be easier to disassemble him for parts to be used elsewhere. Stepping into this one brings a complex wave of sensations, the impact of which makes him swallow back a dry lump in his throat. Three days ago this was, at the very least, his constant. And now it already looks like a dusty haunted house. Dishes left forgotten in the sink, unwashed from that night’s dinner. The awful smell of turning meat never put away. The ice cream container with a little water in the sink. Even the draino is still out on the counter, a macabre reminder of the little horror movie that was now his life. The table is still set, the spoiled food waiting.

He passes the hallway of photos, and flinches at the very jagged and cracked frames on the floor that stare directly at him, a mirror that is not a mirror. A version of him that was undeniably real, and now undeniably unattainable to him, yet taken at a very recent point in time. In a particularly bright one, Shiro holds two fingers above his head, closed eyes against the sun and wearing a grin. Keith smiles earnestly back at himself through the frame, trying to angle the camera and still failing to look directly at it, squinting hard. Another wave of inconvenient emotion hits him. But in its aftertaste, is the uncurling unease of suspicion. This didn’t feel like Shiro’s brand of destruction.

Whoever was here is gone, Keith knows it, smells it, feels it. They didn’t come here to find someone. They came here to find information. He starts at a sprint to the bedroom, ignroing the incongruent feelings of fear and hope that everything will be normal once he reaches the top of the stairs. What he reaches is the end of every single road.

The feeling of wrongness overwhelms him. To see his meticulously coveted and curated wardrobe shredded, disparaged along the floor for garbage heaps is one thing. But to see his emptied weapons cache, his duffel bag of emergencies, his book of anonymous bills, cleared out and gone-

If he hadn’t already learned what it meant to lose everything, the universe is certainly delivering that message now.

He finds nothing in the room, which is coincidentally now also what his life was amounting to very abruptly.

And it’s a familiar feeling he’s feeling now. A dull stab that’s more of an all over feeling, the enemy at your back you didn’t see coming and had no way to prepare for.

Someone _knew_ where everything was. Someone close.

He’s been fucked.

People experience a particular type of anxiety that occurs when someone is in the phase of a transition. Spies are, by nature of work, of a relatively fucked up mentality and one could say in constant state of low grade anxiety that made run of the mill people without this same way of being seem like an absurd and fantastical notion.

In the span of three days he had lost a husband, an identity, his job, his purpose, all his personas, and one could very metaphysically argue, himself.

He’s left with Lance’s gun, which stares out at him for the cold press of a long and lonely devoted second. It’s clunky, inelegant, black and matte. Run of the mill cheap shit. Whoever was behind this purchase was also behind Keith’s current utter demise, and he has to laugh at this cosmic joke.

He is slowly beginning to understand, with a final certainty, that Takashi had both nothing and everything to do with his death right now. That he is as fucked as Keith had been, but it is Keith’s name destined for several bullets now.

Someone is behind this. And it isn’t Shiro, and it isn’t Keith, and it isn’t a jealous pursuer or an ambitious coworker.

And even if he knows, sickly, in his gut, that it could be someone who always had access to his back, he also realizes: it doesn’t matter anymore.

He’s been burned, and the person behind it has made sure to set flame to the fields surrounding all his tunnels.

The thought of fire sounds appealing now, in a way he thinks the house would thank him. Arson felt like  good way to go out. Fitting.

He’s tucking the gun back into his holster pocket. He would change clothes but…they don’t belong to him. And he realizes, now, looking at them all, their brand tags sticking out with immaterial and immeasurable wealth, that he hates them just a little bit. That each time he entertained the idea of wearing them, the face in the mirror looked less and less familiar.

The house creaks around him then, as if in protest. But houses can’t speak, and Keith closes his eyes to listen for what the sound really is. He smiles, and it is ugly.

-

He tails behind Keith after an unimpressive ride down the highway in a minivan that barely went over 35. He had parked a block away from the house, shredded his gear and left his earpiece with a wary Pidge behind it. He’s faster on foot than the ironically named getaway car, and all of this makes Shiro desperate to meet Keith back at the house.

He carries a single firearm as he goes around the back of the house, pointedly avoiding crossing paths with the extremely superfluous existence of Keith’s red bike. It is one of those things that is a marker of the type of person you’re dealing with in their profession. He should have guessed Keith would value style over the ability to fly incognito. Taking in the bike, he’s struck with the deja vu feeling, like he already knows this about Keith.

In some of his favorite action movies, when the hero enters the scene, there might be some badass music to accompany him kicking down the door, smashing through a window, and pummeling every obstacle in his path.

Instead, it’s Shiro carefully opening up the latch he knows he never got around to fixing on the first floor bathroom that he told Keith he had, morphing his stomach over the window sill in a poor imitation of snail climbing over a very small stick, and feeling his hip traitorously ache against age at maneuvers he wouldn’t have even second guessed using several years prior.

It is then opening the bathroom door quietly, forgetting that he had also failed to fulfill the honey-do list of oiling the hinges with WD-40, and letting the terrifyingly slow shrill squeak give him away.

He only gets to see a blur of black and the chance to sound out the first part of Keith’s name before Keith’s kicking his jaw out.

“That’s for never putting any effort into this place.” Keith’s voice sounds raw and hoarse. Shiro’s head hits the wall, but instead of stars, he sees Keith’s angry expression hazy between his eyes. His face is bright with a vivid and pinpointed rage. It is terrifying, and all the more so for being aimed at him. Shiro dodges Keith’s right hook, but he grabs Keith’s elbow and knocks him against the wall in turn, effectively making them trade places.

This means he has Keith under him, snarling and snapping at him, furious and feral, and Shiro is dully in shock that this is happening in their kitchen, even as he has to muscle the squirming, surprisingly strong body of his husband, squeezing him against the wall like he could press the anger out.

“At least I wasn’t going to bed bath and beyond out of spite,” He has to grunt it out into Keith’s shoulder, because Keith is really giving all his years bench pressing the weight of several men a run for his money.

Keith erupts in a brutal yell, and his head knocks viciously up into Shiro’s nose. His foot shoots out from nowhere, and stabs Shiro’s foot pointedly. He yells in shock and backs off, hurting more than he expects Keith’s strength to be able to deliver. It’s possible several toes are now broken, except Keith isn’t giving him enough time to examine that.

“You had me decorating this whole place by myself like your fucking housewife.” Keith lands the punch this time, and Shiro is too dazed to block it. He ducks before Keith can send another kick his way, and rolls over, away, feeling more akin to one of those rolling bugs in the dirt than a capable gun right now. When imagining how this would go down, he knew he’d be fighting with Keith even at his most optimistic. But the trading of verbal blows pulls the rug right out from under him. It also sends him into the deep recesses of his subconscious, where he’s prepared years for this very argument, even if the scenario was a little less predictable.

“You’re the one with the closet full of shit fashion no one wears!” Shiro says, words automatic and sour, looking around for his gun while Keith backs away from him towards the counter- towards the knife block. Fuck.

Shiro dives behind the island just in time to hear their Wustoff pairing knife strike into the grain of the wooden cabinet.

Another one lands, clearly for emphasis, right dead center next to it. Shit.

He looks around, and opens a cabinet.

It’s just garbage bags. Why doesn’t he know where anything is in this god damned kitchen?

_Because Keith does._

“As if you didn’t love bringing some pretty boy model to your mom to make up for the fact that you were bringing home a man,”

“What?” He chokes. Keith’s words are jarring into him with loaded points.

“The goddamn apron, Shiro.”

“What about how passive aggressive you are?” Shiro yells suddenly, a twin anger bubbling up inside him that he needed to untie, as he slowly siddles to the next cabinet.  “You’re so quiet, and then you blow up.” Another knife lands next to the other two. “Case in point. You don’t tell me when you don’t like something.”

Silence. Shiro finds a potential weapon.

Keith’s voice is right on top of him the next moment.

“Maybe if you weren’t unconscious for half our marriage, I’d been able to talk to you.”

Keith’s words hit him and stagger him with both a creeping guilt, and a vile edge of glee. It’s nice to know how sharp the knife you’ve had in your back all these years really is.

Keith also has his gun, which is somehow the less threatening of the two. But Shiro has the fire extinguisher, and unleashes it. “Maybe I’d rather sleep than lose it over having the same goddamn argument again.” He says with heat behind the wall of fire retardant formula, Keith not being fast enough to roll away from the entire hit. He looks mildly undignified for once, and Shiro is mollified by the sight, as he barrels towards it to knock it against something. Anything really. He isn’t aiming for accuracy anymore here.

He grapples with Keith on the ground, erringly familiar to their previous scene, and previous nights long before all this, only Keith’s fighting like there’s nothing left to lose, loose fingers digging into Shiro’s nose and eyes like a toddler exploring object permanence, and Shiro remembers why he originally came here.

“Okay, forget all that- Keith I just wanna help!” He speaks at him, trying to get through to him between dodging and taking hits, because he didn’t come here for this.

Except Keith did come here for this, because Shiro’s pause in effort gives Keith another chance to roll them over. If humans could personify ninja throwing stars, that would be Keith’s fighting style.

“Too late.”

Keith is smaller than him. This is objectively a truth, he is about the size of Lance if Shiro thought enough about it.

But he doesn’t get the chance to think enough about it, because Keith’s thighs are currently cutting off all oxygen supply to his brain and subsequently neck, and Shiro was staring death in the crotch. Sense memory is a funny thing.

“This is what I’m talking about,” Shiro is choking out with what may be his dying breath, but every breath he’s taken since the night Keith tried to poison him has been stolen, in his very private inner thoughts.

“If you wanted to talk… you would have made the effort,” each word come out more stilted, as Keith pulls at his hair and squeezes his trachea harder, the pauses between each syllable greater as a dark cloud fogs his view.

“You pushed me away as much as- I pushed you away.” Shiro’s final gasp wastes away through those words, his vision fading from a nice vignette to completely dark with only the smallest understanding of light.  Keith is choking the ever living shit out of him, but seconds later, he’s the one who makes the long suffering groan like he’s been shot, tumbling off Shiro and grabbing the disused firearm. Shiro stands slowly, trying to ignore the barrel following him by focusing on the face behind it.

Keith’s eyes are bright and small and clouded with anger.  His breath pulls heavy from his chest, like inside he’s his own storm raging and pulsing, and his face is flushed red with the exertion of the last hour. Shiro imagines his own face must be damn purple.

But Keith still has the gun Shiro brought. And Shiro has nothing.

He raises his hands slowly, and Keith cocks the gun. Shiro swallows audibly, feels his blood pumping feels the range of every rifle ever put in his hand being given to Keith, to be pointed back at him with deadly accuracy. Keith is his one man firing squad. He is the bullet named after his death. Maybe it was always going to end like this.

He puts his hands down.

“What are you doing?” Keith’s voice is hoarse, like he’s been crying, and Shiro is tired.

“Shoot me.” Keith looks at him with an unwavering glare, but even this look Shiro recognizes and can read. Maybe he didn’t know Keith. But he knows his signature, the way his face moves, the way his feet sound walking through the door, the way he eats bread piece by piece and holds himself closed, like a clam shell, but still desperate to be fed touch. The way his voice sounds when he’s been crying. The way his eyes look when he’s  scared.

This is Keith, with a signed death warrant on his name.

“I’m not gonna fight you anymore, so you might as well kill me.” His throat is still hoarse but he stares resolutely at Keith, and remembers the day he stood with him at the courthouse, the way Keith looked up to him with a different expression, but still these same eyes that now would chill a fire.

Keith aims the gun unwaveringly, looking somewhere off Shiro’s face, somewhere final and definite and more permanent than the bullet wound he could feel currently slugging out blood again. And Shiro closes his eyes, and waits.

It’s the click of the safety being turned on, that triggers his eyes open, to see Keith tossing the firearm away, shoulders visibly sagging with all the emotionality and tiredness that Shiro has felt in his bones for the last forty-eight hours and potentially last two years.

And he doesn’t care. _He doesn’t care._

It doesn’t matter, his brain yells, but he still grabs one of the knives lodged in the cabinet and pins Keith again, pressing the edge just hard enough. This also brings him close enough to Keith to make the disconcerting observation that someone else had already tried this in the recent past. Keith only laughs around the knife, adam’s apple bobbing, a guttural choked off, cynical and ugly sound.

“That day,” Shiro pants, knife in hand poised to sever Keith’s neck from his body with only the slightest inclination, “That day, the wedding. Why were you there?” _It doesn’t matter._

Keith gives him the benefit of a Cheshire grin, not in the least amounting to any sort of hint of the imminent threat to his life, “A job. Venezuelan arms dealer.”

Shiro’s grip falters. His eyes linger where they shouldn’t, in a soft place right below a small nose, right above a defiant chin.

“He had a medical emergency,” He hears himself say even as the knowledge of the lie dawns on him by the end of the sentence.

The look Keith gives him is significant.

The look Keith gives him is _smug_.

“Heart attack.” He says in a syrupy voice that shouldn’t sound so enticing. Like Shiro is welcome to have some.

“So you, meeting me,”

“Happy accident.”

It sounds too perfect. A voice in the back of his mind is yelling at him to run. But another, much louder voice, is saying nothing at all. It’s moving Shiro’s face closer.

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

“You don’t. But there’s a burn notice on me, and I’m gonna die anyway. What would be the point?”

“No you’re not.” The fierce barrage of words leave Shiro’s mouth before his brain can catch up. He gasps.

Keith’s eyes meet his for a long and uninterrupted look, intensity written into them like brands. Understanding, sudden and quick. They take longer to drop down to somewhere on Shiro’s face, but that is where they inevitably wander. His eyes grow dark. Minutes pass.  A knife clatters to the floor.

It’s the cool mechanical palm of his bionic arm that bridges the distance between them first, kissing the flushed and soot stained side of Keith’s face. He can’t look away from the way Keith’s eyes flutter close, and he leans his cheek further into the touch.

The army told him his gifted weapon of an arm would be good for battles and precision maneuvers. It could deactivate bombs without setting off any triggers. It could do the work of a hundred arms. It could lift a tank.

But Shiro is convinced in his core, that this is when his arm became anything of value. When it is holding Keith’s face, on a warm summer night, and Keith unconsciously leans into the familiar coolness.

Between that moment and the next, Keith’s hands are released from the wall, and they’re tugging into Shiro’s shirt like hooks dragging him to the bottom of the endless ocean that was his mouth.

_The best parts about me are Keith._

-

Shiro isn’t the praying type, but Keith, like this, his mouth above him, his hips pushing himself against Shiro, deceptively submissive, elegant beads of sweat perspiring from his widow’s peak, his choked back sounds when Shiro’s slow inch by inch push finally bottomed out. Shiro prays, he prays with his mouth, soft and gentle on Keith’s jaw, up the column of his neck, tenuously aware this could be the last moment ever that these two bodies would occupy the same space as such, and wanting to remember every moment with sense memory. In two years, in twelve, in the unlikely event that he could survive from this moment fifty years from now, he wants to remember what it feels like to be surrounded by Keith, and have Keith’s fingers dig sharper into his hair even as his mouth goes slack and vulnerable. He wants to remember the moment Keith’s eyes lost their calculated composure.

Of course he could still smell the mildly toxic scent of decaying pork, of the stale trash, the stench of garbage surrounding them. The house was a ruined version of a graveyard, he was fucking Keith in the dirt of their very expensive pit. But even this moment, holding Keith above him, every horrible look, every ache in his body and bones, every silent aggravation, mundane and ordinary lie of their shared life, coalesced into the way Keith’s throat made a sound Shiro had never heard before. It fueled into the way Keith looks down at him with bright, wet eyes, and presses his mouth to Shiro’s temple like he was the only harbor that ever mattered. The last six years could be completely obsolete if not for this one moment. This house could burn for this one moment. In all of creation, Shiro believes there is only so much allotted beauty. When Keith’s broken voice calls him _Takashi_ , he believes this moment is it.

-

“What do you think they’ll say when they try to sell the house?” Keith looks up from where he’s laying against Shiro’s side, feeling sticky with sweat and fluids, and more at peace with himself than he’s felt in what feels like years.

“I don’t know if ‘Two contract assassins lived here and tried to kill each other multiple times’ is gonna be a heightened selling point.” he says wryly, enjoying the looseness of his bones, and the way an arm reaches to grab him by his hip, secure and assuring all at once.

“Interesting history.” Takashi’s grin is out again, and Keith is caught staring at it longer than he means to; he’s _missed_ it.

Keith kisses him then, for no other reason but because he could, and he wants to. Takashi’s throat makes a startled noise as he fights to react and catch up. They kiss slowly, on the kitchen floor, like life ending consequences aren’t a very short and fixed distance away.

“You should have gone into real estate,” Keith says, as he pulls away, savoring the taste of their mouths together. His face looks dazedly at Keith for a few moments, before laying his head down to stare at the ceiling.

“I heard there’s good money in that,” he says in a contemplative voice. Keith huffs a laugh.

“Fine, but what will I do?”

“Astronaut,” he answers without hesitation. Keith gapes at him. The man doesn’t blink. “You always liked to look at the sky. Sometimes, I thought you just had an escape fantasy.”

“Don’t we all?” He lays his head back Shiro’s chest, lets Shiro’s arm curl around his shoulders now and bind them closer together. They’re silent for a while on the tile, Keith listening to his heart beat and trying not to relate it to the same beats on a clock. They breathe, and he thinks about the differences between them, and the perfect, disgustingly perfect similarities.

-

When he wakes, it’s to traitorous cracking daylight through their kitchen window. It could be a typical lazy Sunday morning in bed, except Keith doesn’t know what day it is anymore, and the kitchen stinks.

“Sleep okay?” The fond face belonging to Keith’s pillow for the last few hours looks down at him, and Keith has the familiar feeling of being caught. This time, he likes it.

“Dreamless. Is your shoulder okay?” Keith gets up and starts to feel around the cabinets for something useful. He almost doesn’t hear Shiro’s imperceptible groan at the loss of Keith’s warmth.

Shiro grunts as he adjusts, half propping himself against a cabinet. “It’s fine.” Keith returns with the kitchen first aid kit, kneeling by Shiro. He feels his metal hand trace Nyma’s cut.

“Close.” Shiro muses gruffly, furrowed brow and frowning. “We should patch this up.” Keith feels himself smiling despite the situation. He looks pointedly at Shiro, and traces a similar finger over the bullet hole in Shiro’s shoulder. It could easily be lost amidst the myriad of bruises and mottled scratches on his chest.

“I don’t know, should we do you first?” Shiro looks down, and finds Keith’s hand with his own, lifting the fingertips to his mouth in a tender and intimate gesture.

“You never took off your ring,” Keith notes, softly. Shiro rubs his thumb over Keith’s ring finger.

“Neither did you.”

Keith feels his lips pull again, and sees it in Takashi’s eyes. He leans down, and presses a soft, slow kiss to that mouth. Shiro kisses him with easy forgiveness, the press of his lips below Keith is reverent almost, worshipping. When they pull apart, Keith doesn’t let his mouth hover far.

“Someone did this to us.” He says quietly, in the closest confidence. Shiro’s eyes do something interesting, going from hazy and unbothered, to sharp and focused.

“How are you so sure?” He asks, but the look on his face communicates that he has very similar theories.

“They knew where I kept my guns. Everything else just feels too convenient.” Shiro nods. Keith turns his head, and looks at their kitchen- the light getting brighter like a dawning alarm bell.

“I didn’t think so at first, but the more shit goes on, the more I think this is someone’s idea of a sick joke.”

Keith hums in agreement, and they fall into silence again, continuing to apply the disinfectant to Shiro’s chest.

“So is your real name Keith?”

Keith looks up at him through his lashes.

“As far as I know, it is.”

Shiro nods to himself, like he’s filing away information.

“I’m sorry I ran you off the cliff.” Keith is utterly straight faced, but Shiro snorts.

“And the poison? The elevator?”

“I didn’t poison the food. Elevator wasn’t me.”

“Shooting me in the shoulder?”

Keith looks contemplatively at the wound. “No, I don’t think I’m sorry about that.”

“Then I’m not sorry for not noticing a change in shower curtains.” Keith presses a little harder, by coincidence. Shiro hisses.

“I guess I was kind of passive aggressive.” He admits.

“Are you telling me that’s not a normal thing for you?” Shiro’s smirking, but Keith struggles with the words that come next. Honesty was never a priority for him. Professionally, it was a work hazard.

“I’ve never…there’s never been someone for me to talk to.” Shiro stops grinning the moment Keith moves his hands down. “I’m not used to... communicating was always something we were taught to use as a means to an end. I’m not used to talking without a battle behind it.” Shiro nods thoughtfully, looking down before looking up.

“Would you try with me?”

Keith looks at him, sees the earnestness in his eyes, and feels a wave of so many things shaping itself into desire, into wishes and dreams.

“We don’t have that time.” Keith says honestly, and Shiro’s eyes widen, taken aback.

“We could.”

“You got a way to unburn me?” He can’t help the fond smile that comes over his face. This really was his Shiro. His Takashi. Only newer somehow. Better, if only because there was so much more.

“I know someone who does.” Keith is quiet as he runs through this information, runs through its possibilities, before feeling his heart flutter dangerously.

“Shiro, no-“

Shiro grabs the hand holding the gauze, and Keith is forced to hold onto his shoulder to keep his balance when Shiro shoots forward.

“If you can meet my boss. Just talk. What harm will it do?”

“Shiro-“

“Keith,” Shiro’s voice is pleading, and Keith has no defenses. “We just… we just got a second chance and if there’s a possibility I get to know who you are…if there’s a single solid chance- why wouldn’t you take it?”

He meets Shiro’s eyes, wide and intent at Keith, and Keith knows, he sees, the not so hidden desperation behind it.

“You trust them?”

“With my life.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.” Keith says simply, kindly, with a smile. Because it doesn’t. Not the real question. The question of whether they wouldn’t hesitate to shoot Keith at first glance.

He can feel Shiro’s uncertainty, he can read it on his face and feels mollified that this is the same face and it has always been the same face.

“I’m not letting anything happen to you. They’d have to go through me first” Shiro says, an optimist’s declaration that he can do anything. Keith almost believes he can. He has proven himself unkillable, after all.  And if that isn’t enough, he follows it up with a “Please, Keith. Try, for me.”

Keith looks into those earnest and searching eyes that remind him so starkly of the time they first met so long ago, in that empty alcove. He looks pained and desperate, and like Keith might hold the only answer that matters.  

No one else has ever looked at him like this before.

“We can try,” Keith says, trying the unifying pronoun out in way that feels new on his tongue. He has nowhere to stand, but Shiro seemes stubborn enough to want to align himself with Keith, and Keith is feeling less and less inclined into letting him go. He can set his metaphorical bags down here, inside a person, in a way that is much more terrifyingly intimate and exposing than it has ever held for him before.

“We can try,” Shiro echoes, like he’s sounding out the words in the same context Keith is, and his mouth tips in the edges while forming them. Keith feels the slow creeping dread of something that makes him feel, both sick and anxious and light all at once. He thinks it might be hope. He knows, by the way his heart thuds and his world ends when he meets Shiro’s eyes, that this feeling, it’s love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Idk what I was thinking like I should have known this fic would eventually reach M levels of maturity.  
> I spent more time revising this chapter than I think I did just writing all of chs 1-5 woops. Also, tentatively I have two more chapters outlined and half written. If Vld can calm down with release details I might actually finish this thing before the show ends. Thank you so much for your comments guys! <3


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